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(From the Bibliography of Education for 1894, in Educa- 
tional Review, June, 1905) 

370. Education Theory, philosophy 

‘7 Bardeen, G. W. Fifty-five years old, and other 
stories about teachers. 216p. D. Bardeen, $1. 

‘8 The woman trustee and other stories about 

schools. 259p. D. Bardeen, $1. 

“Fiction has never before been given place in this 
biography, but these stories are so manifestly the 
product of a rich experience and so full of sound 
sense, their abundant and obtrusive ‘morals’ are so 
salutary and their portrayal of certain educational 
shams and evils so vivid, that they certainly deserve 
serious reading by teachers and trustees.” 

(From the Pedagogical Seminary, G. Stanley Hall, Editor ) 

“Mr. Bardeen is the story writer of American ed- 
ucation. He has already written three books of sto- 
ries of New York Schools, and here prints six short 
ones. To our mind this is by far his best book. 
His style is utterly unpretentious and sometimes 
homely, but there is a sense of reality about the in- 
cidents he portrays, and his writings embody the re- 
sults of so much keen observation of the character 
and psychic processes of teachers and everything is 
described as so real that the stories are most impres- 
sive. At the crisis when Paul Pembroke’s fortunes 
are changed for the better, when he protests before a 
large commencement audience against a fraudulent 
diploma, the victory of Sears over the Alpha Upsilon 
Society, and the triumph of Miss Trumbull are pro- 
foundly moving. In the story of the haunted 
school-room we have almost a contribution to hys- 
tero-neurosis, while in Miss Fothergill’s protest we 
have a character of a pushing but unscrupulous girl 
which we fear is to true to life.” 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


AND OTHER 

STORIES ABOUT SCHOOLS 


w BY 

C. W^BARDEEN 

Editor of the School Bulletin 



SYRACUSE, N. Y. 

C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER 
1911 

Copyright, 1911, by C. W. Bardeen 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Roderick Hume, the story of a New York Teach- 
er. With 26 full-page illustrations by L. A. Shrimp- 
ton. Cloth, 16:295, $1.25. 

Commissioner Hume, a Story of New York Schools. 
Cloth, 16:210, $1.25. 

Fifty-five Years Old, and other Stories about 
Teachers. Cloth, 16:286, $1.00. 

The Woman Teacher and other Stories about 
Schools. Cloth, 16 mo, pp. 259, $1.00. 

The False Entry, and other Stories about Schools. 
Cloth, 16 mo, pp. 244, $1.00. 

The Cloak Room Thief, and other Stories about 
Schools. Cloth, 16 mo, pp. 226, $1.00. 

John Brody’s Astral Body, and other Stories 
about Schools. Cloth, 16 mo, pp. 195, $1.00. 

Fifty Fables about Teachers. Cloth, 16 mo, pp. 
164, $1.00. 

The Little Old Man, or the School for Illiberal 
Mothers. With illustrations. Cloth. 16:31, 50 cts. 

Authors Birthdays. Three Series. Illustrations. 
Cloth, 16:320, 459, 367. Each $1.00. 

Dictionary of Educational Biography. With 400 
portraits. Cloth, 12:287, $2.00. 

Teaching as a Business. Cloth, 16:154, $1.00. 

(4) 


:\ ' 

Jp 

©Cl. A 300 628 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

Tom and Tom Tit 9 

On a Tension 51 

Bread upon the Waters 109 

A Life for a Life 157 

A Rescue 197 

The Telltale Photograph 245 


(5) 



Tom and Tom Tit 



TOM AND TOM TIT 


I 

“Here, here, Halsey, this won’t do. 
It’s against orders for you to be in your 
office at half-past five.” 

“Caught in the act, or the Red-handed 
Robber of Reedsboro. Well, Dr. Sherlock 
Holmes, it doesn’t happen often, but I 
have been going over the balance sheets 
of the Cogswell mill, and I believe I shal^ 
close it up.” 

“Losing money?” 

“No, but it isn’t making any, or gaining.” 

“Then keep it running.” 

“That isn’t good business.” 

“It is good sense. There are men and 

( 9 ) 


10 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


women in that mill who began work 
there as boys and girls and don’t know 
how to do anything else. What would 
Tim Ireland do if you shut up the Cogs- 
well?” 

“Almost thou persuadest me to be a 
pauper. I hadn’t thought of him.” 

“Do you know Tim’s wife?” 

“I have seen her; tidy little body.” 

“She is more than that. You never 
paid Tim more than two dollars a day, 
and out of that she has kept as neat a 
house as there^is in the village and brought 
up four children with manners that 
would honor a college president. More 
than once when I have been disgusted at 
some self-made aristocrat’s ostentation I 
have gone to the Irelands for supper and 
eaten bread and milk there in the comfort 
of being surrounded by gentlefolk.” 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


11 


“The children must be growing up.” 

“Nan is in the Oneonta normal, and 
poor little hump-backed Theodore is nearly 
ready for college.” 

“For college? and his father earning 
two dollars a day?” 

“His mother has always saved a share 
of the two dollars, and it has been the 
wish of her heart to give Theodore an 
extra education to make up for his physical 
deformity.” 

“Brave little woman. O well, we’ll 
keep the Cogswell running, of course ; 
and say, doctor, just let me take care of 
Theodore’s college bills. Or rather let 
me in with you on them: I know you are 
mixed up in that college scandal, you 
deep-dyed old schemer.” 

“All right, we’ll talk that over later. 


12 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


I’m glad I hapened in to prevent your 
closing the Cogswell.” 

“Doctor, I used to have a shabby hope 
that some time I might think of one or 
two of these things myself without waiting 
for you to suggest them. You’re a good 
deal busier man than I am now, yet I 
should never have reflected what closing 
the Cogswell would mean to Tim Ireland.” 

“You don’t know the family as I do. 
I have had one sneaking ambition myself, 
some time to ask you to do a thing generous 
enough to satisfy you, so that you wouldn’t 
go on and do so much more. I felt like 
a peanut politician for asking so little. 
But I came in to get you to go down to 
the station to meet the new principal.” 

“Very glad to sample him. Which 
station?” 

“He did not say whether he should 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


13 


come by the Central or West Shore.” 

“Probably he did not know so small a 
village had two stations. He would natur- 
ally take the Central from New York.” 

“I should think so. Let’s go down 
there, any way. I want to see what he 
looks like. I hope he has red blood in 
his veins.” 

“O Mr. Appleton knows what we want 
here; no doubt he’s all right.” 

II 

“The train is just drawing in. I wonder 
if that is he getting off the middle car.” 

“The saints forbid ! That fellow couldn’t 
say boo to a goose.” 

“Still I’ll bet he’s the man. Excuse 
me, is this Mr. Davis?” 

“At your service, gentlemen.” 

“I am Doctor Breeze, and this is Mr. 


Halsey.” 


14 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“It is a pleasure to make your acquaint- 
ance, gentlemen. If I may presume to 
think you came down to welcome me to 
my new field ” 

“That’s it exactly. We want you to 
feel at home from the start.” 

“You make it certain I shall. I suppose 
I ought to inquire about a boarding-place.” 

“I should advise you to go to the hotel 
for a few days, till you can get your bear- 
ings; so much depends on the choice of a 
boarding-house.” 

“I fear my means will not permit 
extended stay at an inn. If some good 
old lady would take me in for the present 
I presume I could make satisfactory 
permanent arrangements.” 

“If you’re going to do much work it 
doesn’t pay to scrimp on grub. We mean 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


15 


to pay enough here to warrant a man in 
getting three good meals a day.” 

“You are very kind. But I have 
usually found some worthy woman whose 
means are limited and to whom it is of no 
little assistance to have liberal recompense 
from an unobjectionable boarder.” 

“The widow Farrington would be glad 
to board you. Shall we take him there, 
Halsey?” 

“The widow Farrington is worthy and 
she needs the money. But she is on the 
oat meal type herself and will try to reduce 
you to it. However, you may as well 
start there.” 

“What do you think of our school 
house there, Mr. Davis?” 

“An admirable building, apparently. Is 
that modest edifice opposite the Church 
of the Heavenly Rest, Doctor Breeze?” 


16 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“Yes; how did you know?” 

“Some question I asked was answered 
on a post card with a picture of the church 
on the back. I suppose we haven’t time 
to stop and enter it?” 

“Hardly: besides there is nothing re- 
markable about it. But we must get 
you to your boarding-place because there 
is a reception for you at 8.’’ 

“How thoughtful. Will somebody call 
for me?” 

“Yes, we will both come for you at 7:45. 
Afterward we will take you around to our 
club. We have a very good billiard room, 
and there are two or three card tables 
going every night. We must put you up 
as a member.” 

“Thank you very much, gentlemen, 
but I must confess I am not a club man. 
I do not play cards or billiards, and while 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


17 


tobacco smoke does not make me ill I 
do not enjoy it.” 

“You know what Talleyrand exclaimed 
to someone who did not play whist, ‘What 
a dreary old age you are laying* up for 
yourself’ ?” 

“It would be a dreary old age for me if 
I had to spend it at the card-table, Mr. 
Halsey.” 

“At any rate you will want to join the 
golf club?” 

“No, Doctor Breeze, I have never played 
golf. In fact I do not play any games.” 

“What do you do with your spare time ?” 

“I never have any spare time, Doctor 
Breeze ; I never see the day when I do not 
have to dismiss reluctantly the things I 
can not crowd into the twenty-four hours.” 

“You know the old metaphor of the bow 
that is always bent?” 


18 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“Yes, Mr. Halsey, but I don’t seem to 
be constrained. They are things I enjoy 
doing.” 

“I am afraid you are too good for this 
world, Mr. Davis. We are a hustling 
lot of folks here, and if you are so different 
from the rest of us you will be at a dis- 
advantage. To be quite frank with you, 
I don’t believe you are going to suit us. 
Mr. Halsey here and I will pay you a 
month’s salary if you will give up your 
contract and take the train back to New 
York to-night. That seems abrupt but 
we mean it kindly. You won’t get on 
here, and it is better to retire than to fail.” 

“Yes, we won’t mind paying you three 
months’ salary, if the check has to be sent 
some distance.” 

“Gentlemen, I believe you do mean 
kindly, as you say, and I thank you. But 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


19 


I did not accept the appointment without 
weighing the conditions here and I think 
it would be unjust both to you and to me 
to run away before the battle began. 
With all my limitations I expect with 
God’s help to succeed, and I must insist 
upon my legal right to make the attempt.” 

“That settles it. We’ve made a bargain, 
and if you hold us to it we shall stand by it. 
Forget what we have just said. You may 
depend upon Mr. Halsey and me to back 
you.” 

‘‘Thank you, Dr. Breeze; I appreciate 
that the more because of your frankness. 
I look to see things turn out better than 
you hope.” 

‘‘All right, Mr. Davis, you shall have a 
square chance. This is the widow Far- 
rington’s. We will call for you at 7:45.” 


20 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


III 

“Well, Halsey, what do you think of 
that?” 

“Stung. Did Appleton pick out this 
man himself?” 

“Yes, I talked with him over the phone. 
He said Davis was a prize.” 

“Then it’s good bye Appleton. If he 
sends us such a milksop as this once 
it is his fault; if he should send another 
it would be our fault.” 

“I doubt if the fellow gets through a 
week here.” 

“He may; the school is in good shape 
now. But when the boys get on to his 
curves they will make his life a howling 
misery.” 

“Well, we must do our best by him. 
We’ll introduce him as if he was bom 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


21 


for the place. But damn that Appleton.” 
IV 

“Brother Gilman, shall we go down to 
meet our new pastor ?” 

“It would be a graceful courtesy, 
Brother Goodman. By which road does 
he come?” 

“Probably by the West Shore: it is 
easier to get clergyman’s half-fare tickets 
that way.” 

“We have just about time to catch the 
train. I hope we shall find that he is 
really called of God to this place.” 

“His piety is pronounced by every one 
to be exemplary.” 

“It was really a great relief to have 
Brother Jenkins resign, he was so worldly.” 

“Yes indeed. I made special inquiries 
to make sure Brother Davis did not dance 
or play cards or indulge in sport. He is a 


22 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


scholarly as well as a devout man, and 
will spend in his study most of the hours 
not devoted to ministerial duties.” 

“There is the whistle of the train. We 
shall just catch him.” 

“I wonder if he is that big, broad- 
shouldered man coming this way?” 

“I hope that is not the man. He is 
worldly and arrogant looking; one would 
question if he had been sanctified.” 

“It can’t be any one else who got off. 
Excuse me, is this Brother Davis?” 

“I am Thomas Davis, at your service, 
gentlemen.” 

“This is Brother Gilman. I am Brother 
Goodman. We are both members of your 
board and have come down to welcome 
you.” 

“Very kind of you, I am sure. Which 
is the best hotel here?” 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


23 


“We had hardly expected you to go to 
a hotel, Brother Davis. The rates are 
very high. We had made provision for 
you to go to the widow Dryleaf’ s, who will 
board you for four dollars a week, and 
surround you with the atmosphere of a 
pious home.” 

“Thanks awfully, Mr. Goodman, but I 
am not so particular about the atmosphere 
that surrounds me as about the roast-beef 
that I surround. I work hard and I have 
to have good fodder. I think I will 
start at the hotel till I can look around. 
I suppose this is the right way. Is that 
the schoolhouse over there?” 

“Yes; but look at the building opposite. 
That is our Church of the Heavenly Rest.” 

“Looks as though they took a rest 
before they finished it. What an ugly 
little abortion it is.” 


24 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“Brother Davis, the congregation that 
built that church made many sacrifices 
to erect it, and they are proud of it.” 

“O I beg your pardon, I did not realize 
the personal equation. I have no doubt 
it is very comfortably arranged inside. 
What a stunning looking woman that is 
over there. Does she live here?” 

“I am not acquainted with her.” 

“You ought to be; she walks like a 
heathen goddess. What a swing she 
has to her hips, almost like a panther’s.” 

“Really, Brother Davis, do you think 
it is seemly to look upon a woman thus 
like an animal?” 

“Why certainly. I should be sorry to 
see in a woman only an animal, but I 
should be more sorry not to recognize and 
appreciate a splendid animal when I saw 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


25 


one, woman or man or horse or dog or 
serpent.” 

“But a man in your position should be 
careful not to seem to make the animal 
predominate.” 

“I don’t know anything in my position 
that obligates me to be unnatural; to 
assume virtues I do not possess or to hide 
feelings which seem spontaneous and 
healthy.” 

“But we engaged you with the un- 
derstanding that you were a godly man.” 

“Then you did not get what you bar- 
gained for. I am not a godly man; I 
don’t want to be a godly man.” 

“Really, Brother Davis, your language 
is most extraordinary.” 

“Why, what does godly mean but god- 
like? If the Almighty had wanted me 
to be a god he would have made me one. 


26 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


He didn’t: he made me a man, and all I 
hope is to be man-like, manly.” 

“But are you not going to teach your 
charge to be godly?” 

“Not a bit of it. Reverence God, I 
shall say, but remember that whatever 
of His attributes you possess are to be 
used in your sphere, which is manhood 
and womanhood. We don’t want any 
little imitation gods growing up.” 

“Your language is shocking, Brother 
Davis, shocking. We have evidently been 
mistaken in you, and as Brother Gilman 
and I are a majority of the committee 
that employed you, we must ask you to 
release us from the engagement.” 

“Not if I know it. I came here in good 
faith on a written contract, and I am 
going to carry that contract out, and make 
you carry it out. I did not undertake to 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


27 


please you two men. I came here to 
serve the people of the village, and I am 
going to do it. I don’t believe they are 
all like you, and if they are I shall do my 
best to make them different.” 

“Really, Brother Davis, this is unparal- 
lelled, unprecedented.” 

“You never mind that. Tell me which 
the best hotel is, and I won’t trouble you 
further.” 

“The American house is the most 
patronized, but the Empire house is 
conducted by one of our own church. We 
should recommend the Empire.” 

“Then I shall unhesitatingly go to the 
American. You will find me there if 
you have further commands for me,” 

“We had intended to ask you to go to 
a reception this evening in honor of the 
new teachers.” 


28 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“I shall be there, of course. Where is 
it held?” 

“We will call for you at quarter of eight. 
We are responsible for you, I suppose, 
however much you disappoint us.” 

“All right; quarter of eight it is.” 

V 

Two shamefaced couples conducted 
their charges to the reception, but the two 
new men rushed at each other. 

“Why, Tom, what are you doing here?” 

“Tom Tit, where on earth did you blow 
down from?” 

“I came here as principal of the union 
school,” replied the tall, broad-shouldered 
one, whom Mr. Goodman had just intro- 
duced to the hostess. 

“And I as pastor of the Church of the 
Heavenly Rest,” said the other, who had 
come with Dr. Breeze. 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


29 


“But how is this?” asked this latter 
gentleman, unable to believe his ears: 
and then to his charge, “Aren’t you Thomas 
Davis of the class of 1900 at Yale?” 

“We are both Thomas Davis of the class 
of 1900 at Yale,” explained the taller one. 
“There were two of us, so I was called Tom, 
and my friend there whose middle name 
is Titcomb was always known as Tom Tit.” 

“Then you are the man Mr. Appleton 
sent us.” 

“Assuredly: and you are much more 
like the sort of men he told me I should 
find on the board than those who met me 
at the station.” 

“Why, yes, the Heavenly Rest fellows 
got hold of you. Neither set of us knew 
what train our men were coming on and 
we mixed those babies up. And you are 
really the man Mr. Appleton sent us?” 


30 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


“Very much at your service and glad 
to be here.” 

“I haven’t felt such relief in a year. See 
here, Goodman, your little church has had 
rather a hard struggle to get along: put 
me down for a hundred-dollar subscription, 
will you? And Halsey, here, will do the 
same, I am sure.” 

“Put me down for a hundred a year as 
long as your new man stays. The doctor 
and I thought he was our new principal, 
and we were deeply impressed by him.” 

VI 

“Come over with us to the club, Mr. 
Davis. Or, say, may I call you Tom? I 
am not given to being familiar, but I have 
taken a liking to you, and we have got to 
distinguish you from Tom Tit. That was 
an awfully lucky escape for us. We offered 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


31 


Tom Tit a month’s salary to give it up 
and go home” 

“He thought you were trustees of the 
church?” 

“Manifestly.” 

“And I thought the other fellows were 
trustees of the school. What a funny mix- 
up. They dismissed me without any 
month’s salary, but I laughed at them. 
I’ll warrant Tom Tit didn’t accept?” 

“No, he said he wouldn’t run away 
before the battle.” 

“No, I guess not. Wait till you know 
Tom Tit. He is preposterous but he is 
genuine, all wool and a yard wide. Why, 
in the freshman rush after the sophs had 
got the cane and were going off with it, 
that slip of a fellow who didn’t weigh a 
hundred and thirty somehow wormed into 
them, got his hands upon the cane and 


32 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


hung on. He was yanked and pounded 
and pounced on till the blood ran down his 
face and he hadn’t a whole garment on him, 
but they couldn’t loosen his grip on that 
cane. He shamed us into forming a flying 
wedge and rescuing him, cane and all. He 
would have made Bones for that if he 
could have got over his oddities, and 
there isn’t a man in the class who wouldn’t 
swear by him.” 

“All the same I am glad our man is Tom 
and not Tom Tit. But I like the way you 
tell about him. This is the club.” 

VII 

“Dr. Breeze, I want to marry your 
daughter: how does that strike you?” 

“The first question to ask would be 
how it strikes her.” 

“I don’t know. I thought it right to 
ask you first.” 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


33 


“You are more considerate than the 
average young man.” 

“Considerateness is not my long suit, 
but I think fathers have some rights 
lovers are bound to respect.” 

“Suppose I say no.” 

“That would go a long way with me, 
especially if you gave the reasons.” 

“Would it be final?” 

“I couldn’t promise that, sir, but I 
should hesitate a long while before I 
sought Helen against your wishes.” 

“It might be unreasonable prejudice.” 

“No, I don’t think you are that kind of 
a man. You know Helen better than I do, 
and I presume you know me as a husband 
better than I know myself. If you say 
we don’t fit it will set me to deep thinking.” 

“Well I don’t say it, Tom. I say I 
would rather have you for a son-in-law 


34 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


than any other man in the world. You 
have not only my consent but my coopera- 
ration. How do you think you stand 
with her?” 

“I think she likes me.” 

“Does she like anybody better?” 

“Tom Tit perhaps.” 

‘‘Heavens, man, I would turn her out 
of the house before I would let her marry 
that sanctimonious parson.” 

“Easy, doctor; remember Tom Tit is 
my best friend. He is not sanctimonious; 
he does things that sanctimonious people 
do, but with him they are genuine. He 
is what you rarely see, a consecrated clergy- 
man, devoted in every thought to his 
vocation.” 

“Well I don’t want any consecrated men 
around me. I feel like Beatrice that if 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


35 


I had a son-in-law like him I should want 
another for week-days.” 

“O Tom Tit isn’t so bad, doctor, and he 
is improving. He has become a golf 
enthusiast, and actually when he foozled 
his approach to the ninth hole to-day his 
lips looked as though he whispered Damn; 
I know he felt it.” 

“That is encouraging. He may yet 
grow human.” 

“Then see what he has done for that 
church. People tell me it used to be so 
narrow.” 

“It was. It was made up of unusually 
conscientious people, who did a lot of 
good in the way of benevolence, but who 
made every member sit stiff in a high- 
backed chair.” 

“Tom Tit has broadened them. They 


36 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


are really social now. Even Deacon Good- 
man has been seen to smile.” 

“Tom Tit was a fit for that church: 
there is no doubt of that. But you don’t 
honestly think Helen prefers him to you?” 

“I don’t know; she ought to: he is ten 
times the man I am in every way.” 

“A wretched little country parson.” 

“Mark my words, doctor, Tom Tit will 
be a bishop and deserve to be. He is a 
profound scholar, and a moving preacher. 
You know Helen goes to hear him every 
Sunday.” 

“So do you, but I supposed it was 
because Helen did.” 

“That would be reason enough, but I 
go because Tom Tit helps me to be a 
better man. There is in his service a 
certain atmosphere of peace and quiet and 
repose from the petty struggles of life, and 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


37 


I always come away feeling as if my am- 
bitions were cleansed and I was striving 
for something a little higher.” 

“And you come away with Helen, I 
suppose.” 

“No, doctor, I play fair. He likes to 
walk home with Helen too, and unless he 
is detained at church I let him do it.” 

“In my courting days that would have 
been called rather more than generous.” 

“It doesn’t seem so to me. I want 
Helen for my wife, but not if Tom Tit will 
make her a better husband. He will if 
he is as well adapted to her, and I want 
her to have a chance to find out whether 
he is.” 

“We didn’t used to feel that way about 
it in my time, but you must do your courting 
in your own way. Remember I am for 
you to the last.” 


38 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


VIII 

“Tom Tit, do you know why I invited 
you to go to walk this afternoon?” 

“I hope there are forty reasons: there 
are eighty why I am glad to go with you.” 

“There are eighty for me too, old 
fellow, but there is one that out-weighs 
all the rest. Do you love Helen Breeze?” 

“I expect to marry her.” 

“Whew! So soon? Are you engaged to 
her?” 

“I have never spoken of love to her.” 

“Then where do you get the assurance 
that you will marry her?” 

“Because I expect to marry her to you.” 

“But, Tom Tit, don’t you love her your- 
self?” 

“I should not feel authorized to say 
that. Helen Breeze is out of my sphere. 
She is a healthy, happy, joyous girl, born 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


39 


to adorn life in the midst of luxury. The 
woman I marry must be prepared to share 
a lowly lot, to work hard, to care for those 
who will prove ungrateful, to devote 
herself to a life of service apparently 
unrewarded.” 

“The woman doesn’t live who can do 
that more cheerfully and effectively than 
Helen if she loves you, Tom Tit, and I 
am afraid she does. I want her myself, 
but not if you will make her happier.” 

“Tom, you are the best fellow on earth. 
It seems to me that the man who could 
marry Helen and make her happy would 
have the one great prize of living, and 
might count himself blessed whatever 
else came to him. But you are the man, 
not I.” 

“Helen must choose. We will both do 


40 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


our best to win her, and she will know 
which of us is the man for her.” 

“She will choose you, Tom, and she 
ought to. But it is generous of you not to 
hurry her. I must confess there is a 
certain delight in even the thought of a 
possibility.” 

IX 

“Helen, which of these two Toms are 
you going to marry?” 

“Honestly, father, I don’t know. When 
I am with either of them I feel as though 
any woman in the world might be blessed 
to be his wife.” 

“But there must be a difference.” 

“There is. With Tom I feel the joy of 
living; everything seems bright and cheer- 
ful and abounding with delight; he is so 
big and strong and brave that I feel as 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


41 


if I could nestle up into him and be wafted 
through life in perfect contentment.” 

“Then he is the man for you to marry.” 

“It seems so when I am with him. But 
when I am with Tom Tit there seems to be 
more in life than enjoyment. He is so 
earnest, so high-minded, so devoted to 
others, that a life of service seems the 
only one worth living.” 

> “You will have service enough, my 
girl, whomever you marry, and you might 
better devote yourself to your own chil- 
dren, whom you can enjoy and control, 
than to the children of the riff-raff of the 
community who will be ungrateful and 
impossible.” 

“You are the last one to preach that 
doctrine, daddy. There is hardly a family 
jn the village that you have not somehow 


42 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


helped, yet certainly you have never 
neglected me.” 

“You are all I have had in this world 
since your mother died, my little girl. I 
bustle and bluster around and make a 
great show of work, but deep in my heart 
I care more for your little finger than for 
all the rest of the world. Your future 
is the only thing that counts with me. 
You say you can not decide between these 
two men. Let your old father decide for 
you. I want to feel that I leave you in 
the care of a big, strong, brave man, who 
will protect you from all harm. Tom is 
that man. If you were with Tom Tit and 
some man insulted you Tom Tit would 
expostulate with him. Tom would land 
a fist under his chin and send for the 

it 


coroner. 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


43 


“I don’t think Tom Tit lacks courage, 
father.” 

“No, but he lacks self-assertiveness. 
He is of the turn-the-other-cheek kind. 
I don’t want him to turn my daughter’s 
other cheek. Come, Helen, I am a good 
deal older than you and I know men 
pretty well. Marry Tom.” 

“You must give me time to think of 
it, father. O daddy, I wish you knew how 
I appreciate what you are to me.” 

X 

The village of Ashburnham has grown 
up on the banks of a branch of the Mohawk, 
short but with such a fall that almost from 
its source it is bordered with factories. 
Ordinarily it seems insignificant enough, 
its water that has been whipped into the 
service of a hundred wheels looking as 
dispirited as a worn-out carthorse. But 


44 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


its valley is a steep one, and freshets are 
frequent. There is a reservoir at Peter- 
sham, meant to control the flow; but once 
that reservoir gave way, and the older 
inhabitants tell of houses that were swept 
down #ie stream through the village. 

Of late years the main danger had been 
from ice. When this broke up in the 
spring it was apt to come down in such 
force as to threaten the old Stone Bridge, 
the pride of the village, the handsome 
arches of which were so low that the big 
cakes of ice accumulated as the water 
rose, and more than once had threatened 
to sweep the bridge away. 

This year the breaking of the ice had 
been unusually sudden, and one Saturday 
morning word was passed around that 
the Stone Bridge would have to be looked 
after. On the recent death of the presi- 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


45 


dent of the village, Dr. Breeze had been 
elected to succeed him, and, always a 
leader, felt this time the entire responsibili- 
ty. He closed the bridge, placing guards 
at each entrance, and got laborers there 
early in the morning to break up the 
masses of ice with pick and crowbar. It 
was dangerous work; the ice was rotten 
and the current swift; one man had been 
swept under the bridge and rescued with 
difficulty. As the danger became greater 
the men refused any longer to venture 
and the mass of ice gathered high against 
the centre of the bridge, each fresh accre- 
tion as it swept over the dam above adding 
itself with a new shock, till people thought 
they could see the stone arches begin to 
yield. 

Indignant at the cowardice of the men, 
Dr. Breeze seized a crowbar and rushed 


46 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


up to the crest of the ice, dividing it with 
force and effect, but not realizing he was 
in the same danger as a man who sits on 
the branch of a tree and saws it off nearer 
the trunk. The crowd saw it however, 
and Tom, who came up at just this time, 
tied a rope about his waist and started 
toward the doctor. 

Just then the ice at the north arch gave 
way and went sweeping under the bridge, 
leaving ten clear feet of water between 
Tom and the ice in the centre of the stream. 
He was meditating a flying leap and won- 
dering whether the ice would hold him 
even if he cleared the space, when Tom Tit 
came up, roused from his study of a Greek 
phrase by the general alarm which some- 
body had sounded on the village fire-bell. 
Taking in the situation at a glance, he 
seized a pickaxe some workman had 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


47 


dropped, swung it back to give him 
momentum, jumped upon the first cake 
of ice that came sailing by, and sprang 
across, reaching the other side safely 
though the ice sank under water at both 
edges and broke in two as he leaped from 
it. He reached Dr. Breeze’s side just as 
the ice began to separate, but in time to 
throw the flat edge of the pickaxe over 
the edge of the bridge, where it held 
firm. Hanging by the handle he called 
to the doctor to seize him about the waist, 
and as the doctor wavered he cried : 
“Don’t hesitate; I could hold us both for 
an hour; my grip is my strong hold.” 

Even in that moment of peril the doctor 
smiled at the unconscious definition, but 
as he sank with the ice he hung more and 
more of his weight upon Tom Tit, and 


48 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


found that the pickaxe was indeed holding 
them both securely. 

By this time Tom had rushed around 
to the entrance to the bridge, knocked 
down two of the guards who obstructed 
his entrance, and run to the middle, where 
he held over the rope still tied to his 
waist, and instructed the doctor how to 
transfer his weight from Tom Tit to the 
rope. This the doctor accomplished, but 
he was no athlete and could not climb the 
rope, nor could Tom lift him as a dead 
weight. By Tom Tit's suggestion, however, 
the doctor pushed himself away from the 
bridge by his feet, brought his feet up 
opposite his hands, and as Tom pulled 
the rope literally walked over the parapet. 

Tom Tit was easily drawn up, and the 
three hurried from the bridge, which was 
still in great danger. The first one to 


TOM AND TOM TIT 


49 


greet them was a white-faced girl who 
had seen everything with agony but 
without a sound. She put her hand on 
Tom Tit’s arm and murmured, “I know 
now.” Tom placed a loving hand on the 
shoulder of each. “I knew all the time,’ 
he said sadly. 







On a Tension 


\ 




ON A TENSION 


I 

“Here I am to pay my commission, Mr. 
Appleton. There’s the full fifty dollars 
according to your rules, but I don’t ex- 
pect to stay the year out.” 

“I expect you to stay a good many years 
out, Miss Barrett. What seems to be the 
trouble?” 

“The principal.” 

“That is near- wit; at least it has the 
element of surprise. I have known him 
ever since he left college and this is the 
first reflection I have heard upon him. 
Isn’t he honest?” 


“The most honest man I ever saw.” 
( 53 ) 


54 


ON A TENSION 


“Present company — I hope?” 

“Not a bit of it. You wouldn’t say 
anything that wasn’t true: he says every- 
thing that is true.” 

“Offensively blunt, then?” 

“Blunt, but never offensively. He shows 
such sincere sympathy that his criticisms 
seem like caresses.” 

“Not selfish, then?” 

“I never saw another man so ready to 
do any thing at any time for any body.” 

“Meddlesome?” 

“It never seems so in him. His greatest 
delight is to perpetrate little surprises of 
help just when they are sure to be wel- 
come.” 

“Certainly he is an efficient principal?” 

“I never saw a school run so like clock 
work without any apparent machinery.” 


“And he gets results?” 


ON A TENSION 


55 


“The children are so wide-awake and 
earnest I have had to hold my classes back, 
from the first recitation.” 

“Is he personally disagreeable to you?” 

“He is fascinating. The night I got 
there he called upon me and I never en- 
joyed a conversation more in my life. 
Why, I said bright things myself.” 

“Incredible! This seems to be a game 
of mystification, Miss Barrett: what is it 
that has all the characteristics of what 
isn’t? Why shouldn’t you like Mr. Wil- 
lard?” 

“I do like Mr. Willard; I thiri^he is a 
wonderful and a noble man.” 

“Then why can’t you finish the year 
with him?” 

“Because he wears me out; he wears 
everybody out. He is so full of life and 
energy and work and enthusiasm that 


56 


ON A TENSION 


he keeps us all keyed up beyond what we 
can endure. I have said that I enjoyed 
that first long conversation. I did, but 
I have taken pains to give him no chance 
for another. He set my brain to working 
so that I did not sleep that night. It 
was days before I could get my thoughts 
back from the problems that he made so 
vivid to me.” 

“He must relax occasionally.” 

“Never. That’s just it. If he was not 
always so intent, always so full of enthu- 
siasm, always so ready to see in any topic 
the possibilities of all others.” 

“Doesn’t he play games?” 

“Yes, but in the same intense way: he 
never lets his mind rest in them. Do you 
know tit-tat-too ?” 

“Where you have nine or sixteen or 
twenty five squares and make alternately 


ON A TENSION 


57 


crosses and circles and try to get rows of 
threes ?” 

“Yes. It is a child’s game : I have played 
it with a boy five years old and been 
beaten. Mr. Willard called on me one 
evening when I felt I couldn’t let myself 
be stirred up, so I brought out this infan- 
tile game, which it happened he had never 
seen.” 

“Did it side-track him?” 

“In half an hour he had constructed a 
mathematical solution of all its possibilities, 
demonstrating that if the first player put 
his mark in a central square he could not 
be beaten, and if he put it in an edge 
square he could not win. If I would have 
sat up with him till midnight he would 
have elaborated all the possibilities from 
the second and all succeeding plays. I 
could not help yield to the glamor of his 


58 


ON A TENSION 


demonstrations, and I dreamed all night 
in formulae, let % equal the position of 
the second player at the end of the fourth 
move, and all that. What he worked 
out in that hour would have made an 
interesting magazine article, but my brain 
was not in a condition to collaborate in 
magazine articles. I must have rest now 
and then.” 

“Doesn’t he rest?” 

“Never. Why, he copyrights his 
dreams.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Tells them at breakfast so as to fix 
them in his mind, makes brief notes and 
lets them run through the background 
of his thoughts all day, and at night writes 
them out as articles for The Educational 
Review with all rights of subsequent publi- 

V 

cation reserved.” 


ON A TENSION 


59 


“Then his dreams are pedagogical V* 

“Yes, his mind is so well trained that 
it follows the route like a milkman’s horse 
without the driver.” 

“Does his body stand all this?” 

“He is preposterously healthy. He 
never had a headache in his life, enjoys 
every meal, and sleeps from ten till six so 
soundly the fire-bell won’t wake him. 
His consciousness of dreams comes only 
when he is awake for good and ready to 
accept them as little gifts of Morpheus 
thrown in on the side.” 

“Then isn’t Mr. Willard’s activity the 
normal energy of good health and good 
habits, seeming excessive because sound 
health and good habits are so unusual?” 

“I don’t think so. My ideal is to make 
a recitation contemplative ; not only 
thoughtful but leisurely, with opportunity 


60 


OK A TEKSIOK 


to browse over the topics that come up, 
and wander off if a side-issue proves in- 
teresting.” 

‘‘But how can you get anywhere that 
way?” 

‘‘Where do we want to get to? It 
seems to me the text-books and the lesson 
of the day are only suggestive of the work 
of the recitation. Our aim is to develop 
thoughtful and earnest men and women, 
and we must seize the opportunities that 
present themselves. No author that wrote 
a text-book twenty years ago, no regents 
committee that prepared a syllabus, can 
tell just what ethical question may develop 
in my history recitation next Monday, 
an earnest discussion of which will make 
every boy and girl in my class better 
fitted to perform the duties life brings. 
I must have time to watch for such oppor- 


ON A TENSION 


61 


tunities; when I recognize them I must 
have time to improve them.” 

“You don’t think Mr. Willard would 
object?” 

“No, indeed: he would be the first to 
approve and applaud. But the spirit of 
rush he has infused into the school makes 
it difficult. You feel as though the spirit 
everywhere was, ‘Get ahead! get ahead!’ 
A recitation should be like taking a walk 
into the country. You should have plenty 
of time, and no purpose that may not be 
modified by what occurs. Perhaps you 
have intended in a general way to walk 
to Winchedon, but you may run across a 
geological formation or a birds nest or a 
colony of ants that make it worth while 
to stop half a mile out of town. It is well 
enough to be able to rush for a train if an 
appointment makes it necessary, but rush- 


62 


ON A TENSION 


ing for a train isn’t profitable walking on a 
Saturday afternoon.” 

“You are wholly right, Miss Barrett, 
and I am glad you recognize conditions 
so clearly. I will tell you a secret: I sent 
you to Braintree because you have this 
restful temperament. When Miss Coolidge 
resigned and the president of the board 
came here, I said to him, ‘Now you have 
plenty of dynamic force in school. Mr. 
Willard is a splendid fellow: he is putting 
life and energy into every boy and girl 
under him. But they must not grow up 
to think the only force in the world is of 
that vigorous kind. I want to send you a 
woman who never hurries, who always 
takes time to listen and observe and dis- 
cuss, and yet who will carry her classes 
in a term as far as Mr. Willard. He is the 
waterfall: she is the broad, deep, quiet 


ON A TENSION 


63 


river that accomplishes just as much in 
another way. Both will have a useful 
influence on the school, but they are so 
different that they will supplement each 
other.’ He saw the point, and that is why 
you are getting two hundred dollars a year 
more than they ever before paid a precep- 
tress.” 

“You have a good deal of confidence in 
me, Mr. Appleton.” 

“I have always put a good deal of con- 
fidence in you. When you were gradu- 
ated a dozen girls in your class registered 
with me. As they called of course I asked 
each one by one about the others. I 
found you were the first of your class 
elected to Alpha, and that you were presi- 
dent senior year, and when I asked, ‘What 
member of the class do you think has been 
most helpful to the rest of you as a whole,’ 


64 


OK A TEKSIOK 


every one of those girls replied unhesitat- 
ingly, ‘Rebecca Barrett’. So you see I 
was justified in sending you to Templeton.” 

“What a reckless thing that seemed for 
you to do. But you inspired me with 
your confidence, and it proved a blessed 
thing. If you had only done as well by 
me this year. I never can endure Mr. 
Willard forty weeks.” 

II 

“Is Mr. Willard as bad as that?” 

“He won’t be after Miss Barrett mar- 
ries him.” 

“Miss Barrett, who has just gone out, 
marry Mr. Willard?” 

“Within a year.” 

“Why didn’t you tell her she would?” 


“Because I want her to.” 


ON A TENSION 


65 


III 

“Good day, Mr. Appleton.” 

“How do you do, Mr. Willard? Glad 
to see you. How is your new preceptress 
getting on?” 

“O Mr. Appleton, she is a daily delight 
to me.” 

“What is the answer?” 

‘ ‘All these years it has annoyed me that 
you couldn’t make a mistake. With all 
the variety of teachers and all the kinds 
of places you always seemed to match us 
just right, and your unerringness had be- 
come wearisome.” 

“And Miss Barrett is out of place?” 

“Like a bull in a china shop, or rather 
like a Sevres vase in a bull pen.” 

“Your amended simile is more flattering 
to Miss Barrett than to the school.” 


66 


ON A TENSION 


“Yet there is a certain fitness in it. 
Miss Barrett is an exquisite bit of feminini- 
ty : she would be charming to look at under 
glass. But we are hustlers down at Brain- 
tree and she can’t keep up with the pro- 
cession.” 

“Must be unpopular, then?” 

“No, indeed: everybody likes her: rather 
more than that. She has a winning per- 
sonality and a voice it is a delight to listen 
to.” 

“Slow-witted, then?” 

“Slow-witted? Why, you must have 
talked with her, Mr. Appleton: she keeps 
me guessing. Only it is hard to pin her 
down to a serious subject.” 

“Frivolous?” 

“No, indeed. If I were to pick one 
adjective for her I should call her serene.” 

“That isn’t a reflection on her.” 


ON A TENSION 


67 


“Nothing is a reflection on her: she is 
an admirable woman. The reflection is 
on you for sending her where she doesn’t 
fit.’’ 

“You haven’t convinced me that she 
doesn’t fit.” 

“How can she fit when she looks down 
on the school and everybody in it?” 

“Did you ever hear her say she looked 
down on you?” 

“She doesn’t have to say it. I don’t 
have to be kicked down stairs before I 
discover she is dissembling her love.” 

“Tell me some way she shows that she 
looks down on you.” 

“Her very leisureliness is a reproach. 
All the rest of us come rushing up to the 
schoolhouse as if we were eager to arrive 
and get to work, and along she strolls 
tranquilly as if she had all day to spare.” 


68 


ON A TENSION 


“She is at her desk in time, isn’t she?” 

“O yes, but it is the spirit of the thing. 
It is as though she said to all the rest of us, 
‘If you would only plan ahead as I do 
you wouldn’t need to hurry.’ ” 

“And isn’t that a good example to set?” 

“I don’t think so. Plan as carefully 
as you like and now and then emergencies 
will arise, so that you have to hurry.” 

“Don’t you think she would hurry if 
emergency arose?” 

“I doubt it: she would rather let every- 
thing go to the demnition bow-wows than 
have her equipoise disturbed.” 

“Say that again, Mr. Willard, and say 
it deliberately.” 

“I beg your pardon, it isn’t true; I take it 
back. She is a good woman, a true woman ; 
in an emergency she would do all that a 
true woman should. But emergencies are 


ON A TENSION 


rare, and all the rest of the time she is 
constant reproach to us with her deliberate 
movements.” 

“Do you think she means them as 
reproach ?” 

“Sometimes I do. When I have come 
rushing into her room with some matter ctf 
immediate importance she has now anti 
then replied so meditatively that she might 
as well have said in so many words, ‘Why 
get so excited over it, Mr. Willard ? There 
lots of time and it is all ours. Let’s be 
leisurely about it.’ ” 

“And isn’t that sometimes good advice ?V 
“Very likely. But don’t you see hojv 
cheap it makes me feel to be reprove)! 
that way by a subordinate ? I cannot he p 
her not respecting me, but I have a right 
to ask that she shall conceal her lack 
respect.” 


f ' 


ON A TENSION 


\ 


i 

0 

“Would you like to know what Miss 
Barrett really thinks of you?” 

How do you know what she thinks?” 
She came in this morning to pay her 
commission, and she told me.” 

“If it would not be betra; 'ing confidence 
I should like to know.” 

“I am not in the habit of betraying 
i confidence. What she said was said open- 
ly and freely, in the presence of my assis- 
| tants here.” 

“Then I should certainly like to hear it.” 

“She said you were the most honest man 
1 $he ever knew, so sympathetic that your 
criticisms were like caresses, always ready 
tp do anything for anybody, but never 
meddlesome, and counting it your greatest 
triumph to do little unexpected services.” 
“But that I did not know anything about 
ming a school?” 


ON A TENSION 


71 


“That she never saw a school run so like 
clockwork without any apparent machinery, 
her children so wide-awake and earnest 
that she had to hold them back.” 

“But that personally I was very dis- 
agreeable?” 

“That personally you were fascinating; 
she had never enjoyed a conversation more 
than with you.” 

“Mr. Appleton, did she really say these 
things?” 

“I have given you her exact words.” 

“Thank you for telling me, Mr. Appleton: 
it will make things easier. I really thought 
she despised me and my methods. Of course 
I understand that you have not told me all 
she said, but just now I do not feel like 
hearing the criticisms. If she really thinks 
there is enough good in me so that she 
can work alongside of me without losing 


72 


ON A TENSION 


her self-respect I think we can get through 
the year.” 

“Then let me repeat another remark of 
hers: T like Mr. Willard; I think he is a 
wonderful and a noble man.’ ” 

“You make me humble, Mr. Appleton. 
I know as well as you how little I deserve 
that she should think so, but it is a great 
encouragement that it should seem so to 
her.” 

IV 

“What are you going to do Saturday, 
Mr. Willard?” 

“Saturday is to be a great day, Miss 
Barrett: I am going to rearrange the labor- 
atory.” 

“All in one day?” 

“Yes, it has to be done in one day so as 
not to interrupt the work. But if I begin 
at eight I think I can finish before dark.” 


OH A TE^SIOiT 


73 


“Can’t you begin before eight?” 

“No, the days are growing so short that 
one can’t get in much time before break- 
fast. June 21 is the great holiday of my 
year, when I can read by daylight at four 
o’clock. It is a joy to approach it, but 
O how I dread seeing the days grow short 
again.” 

“What time do you get up now?” 

“Only in time to be dressed at six. I 
find that artificial light before breakfast 
is trying to the eyes.” 

“What do you do in these early morn- 
ing hours?” 

“That is my time for collateral reading 
to keep my recitations fresh. Just now I* 
am finishing Mitford’s Greece.” 

“What will you do Saturday night after 
you have finished your laboratory?” 

“My evenings go to some annotated 


74 


ON A TENSION 


editions of English classics that I am get- 
ting out for Nobody & Co. One can do 
that kind of work when one is too tired 
to do anything else.” 

“So I should judge from the specimens 
I have seen. Have you done many of 
these?” 

“Four have been published, and I have 
eleven more under way.” 

“Are you paid well for this work?” 

“I get ten dollars for each one, a hundred 
and fifty dollars altogether.” 

“Ten dollars just for annotating Paradise 
Lost ? Why, that is two-fifths as much as 
Milton got for writing it.” 

“It isn’t much of a price, but it is a good 
thing for me to work up on these master- 
pieces.” 

“I haven’t seen any of your four, but 
most of such books are more of a hindrance 


ON A TENSION 


75 


than a help: they give only obvious in- 
formation.” t 

“That’s just what the publishers want. 
I had to rewrite my first notes; the pub- 
lishers said they were too learned.” 

“What is the use of interrupting the read- 
er’s attention to tell him what he already 
knows?” 

“As Dr. Johnson said, a fisherman does 
not bait his hook by his own taste but by 
the taste of the fish. These books are made 
like Moses’s green spectacles, to sell. I 
wouldn’t use them in my own school.” 

“And on Sunday?” 

“O Sunday is my luxury. I go over 
to the schoolhouse and lock myself in 
absolutely secure from intrusion for six 
hours. That is really the joy of the week.” 

“And what do you do ?” 

“The one thing which I hope to have 


76 


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amount to something. Every man ought 
to aim to make one little individual con- 
tribution to knowledge: to ascertain some- 
thing that has not been discovered before, 
and to fix it so definitely that it will not 
have to be discovered again.” 

“And what do you hope to fix?” 

“It is a point in psychology. While we 
have been talking you have winked a num- 
ber of times: that was wholly unconscious, 
wasn’t it ?” 

“Yes.” 

“But what you have said has been 
conscious, of course.” 

“Certainly.” 

“Now between the winking and the talk- 
ing there have been a score of actions, little 
movements, change of position, glancing out 
of the window and so on, which it would 


OK A TEKSIOK 


77 


puzzle you to say whether they were con- 
scious or not.” 

“That is true.” 

“Now that point, just where an action 
becomes conscious, has not been definitely 
determined, so far as I know, and I hope 
to determine it.” 

“What is your idea about it?” 

“I shouldn’t like to say yet. Of course 
the first thing is to read all that has been 
written: somebody else may already have 
determined this. I spent the summer vaca- 
tion in the State library, with the privilege 
of getting in two hours early by a special 
key, and I think I may say that I have read 
everything on the subject in English, book, 
pamphlet, and periodical. I have also 
run through all the leading French writers . 
But the Germans seem interminable. I 
have already gone carefully through more 


78 


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than a hundred treatises, and apparently 
I have only begun." 

“And it is these German books on 
psychology you read Sunday morning?" 

“Yes. It is delightful to lay half a 
dozen of them out for comparison, as the 
new author is taken up, and feel that for 
six hours one can study without interrup- 
tion. But I dread two o’clock as much as 
I do June 22." 

“Why don’t you take sandwiches with 
you and stay till dark ?" 

“I have tried that, but I found the 
afternoon work was not satisfactory. For 
this investigation one’s mind must be 
fresh, with all the tentacles of thought 
eager to grasp new ideas.” 

“Then your great work gets only six 
hours a week?" 

“Only six hours of investigation: but it 


ON A TENSION 


79 


has practically all my spare thought. When 
I walk alone, even for a short distance, 
some point is always at hand for considera- 
tion, and the great joy of going to bed is 
that I can now take up some point that is 
especially interesting.” 

“Then how do you get to sleep?” 

“That takes care of itself: I never hear 
the clock strike twice.” 

“Does your mind rest while your body 
sleeps?” 

“It feels rested in the morning, but I 
must keep at work, for often I wake up 
in the night and find some thought worked 
out so clearly that I wonder I had not seen 
it before.” 

“What do you do, jump up and jot it 
down?” 

“Not usually: it takes so long to do it 
and wakes me up so much. Usually I say 


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it over a few times to fix it in memory and 
can recall it in the morning. But some- 
times I lose a thought this way: I often 
wish I were married.” 

“What. is the connection?” 

“If I had a wife as interested as I am 
in this investigation and a good stenog- 
rapher, I could nudge her when I waked 
with one of these revelations, and have 
her jump up and make notes in detail, 
with all the freshness of background.” 

“But suppose you had children?” 

“I can’t suppose that yet a while. I 
must get some of my work done before I 
drop into what is called family life.” 

“Then if you want a wife only as a 
stenographer, why not get a dictaphone? 
You could have one that works by elec- 
tricity, and when you wake up with a big 


ON A TENSION 


81 


thought all you need is to press a button 
and talk into a horn.” 

“But is it really practicable? I know 
a man who used to use graphophones, but 
they were indistinct, his stenographers 
used to guess at what he had said, and he 
finally threw the machine ears out.” 

* “The dictaphone is a great improvement. 
My uncle dictates all his correspondence 
that way without mistake. It would be 
so much less trouble than a wife, and it 
couldn’t have children.” 

“Yes, it would be better in every way. 
Do you know how much one costs?” 

“Probably a hundred and fifty dollars, 
with all the accessories.” 

“My next month’s salary must go for 
that : and there are so many more German 
books I want. But they must wait.” 

“Mr. Willard will you do me a favor?” 


82 


OK A TEKSIOK 


“A personal favor?” 

“Yes.” 

“Most assuredly I will: it is always a 
pleasure to do anything for you.” 

“I believe that is true, Mr. Willard, but 
this is a great favor.” 

“If it is personal to you it is granted.” 

“I have an invitation for you and me 
to join a house party over Sunday near 
Fourth lake. We can go from here after 
school Friday and get there by nine o’clock, 
and we can come away from there Monday 
morning and get back in time for school. 
There will be four others whom you do 
not know but whom you will like. I want 
you to give up your Saturday and Sunday 
work and take this holiday with me.” 

“But, Miss Barrett, a house party is 
just about the one sort of company I am 
least fitted for.” 


ON A TENSION 


83 


“That isn’t the consideration: it is the 
personal favor to me you promised.” 

“Your statement that it is a personal 
favor to you is so flattering that I shall 
keep my word.” 

V 

“The others have gone away and left us, 
Mr. Willard: we have a whole afternoon 
to ourselves.” 

“What shall we do with it?” 

“What do you want to do with it, Mr. 
Willard?” 

“We might climb that little mountain 
over there.” 

“It is twelve miles to the base of that 
mountain, Mr. Willard.” 

“How deceiving these distances are. We 
might walk to Remsen.” 

“What do we want in Remsen?” 


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“Just to have some association connected 
with the name.” 

“There are a thousand villages in New 
York larger and more interesting than 
Remsen.” 

“But Remsen is the place we can get ac- 
quainted with to-day. It is part of my 
theory of life to take opportunities while 
they are at hand.” 

“Then why not get acquainted with me 
instead of with Remsen?” 

“O I shall be getting acquainted with 
you as we walk along.” 

“What an insignificant incident of the 
afternoon I must be. I might have hoped 
you would be glad of an afternoon’s un- 
disturbed conversation.” 

“I am: but this is my only chance to 
see Remsen, and I can talk with you any 
time.” 


ON A TENSION 


85 


“Really, Mr. Willard — ” 

“That was pretty complete, wasn’t it ? 
Suppose I prove to you it is the greatest 
compliment I could pay you.” 

“If you can, I shall pronounce you a 
master of dialectic.” 

“Here goes. Major premise, whenever 
I feel exstatic I say ridiculous things. 
Are you that way, Miss Barrett?” 

“You seem to be sparring to gain wind, 
Mr. Willard.” 

“No, but really, haven’t you found that 
when you are exultant you are likely to 
bubble over into some absurd remark?” 

“I don’t know that I recollect having 
felt exultant, not to say exstatic, and I 
do not remember having given myself that 
excuse for foolish remarks.” 

“It is characteristic of me, so much so 
that I have tried to associate with the feel- 


86 


ON A TENSION 


in g of exultation the caution that I am 
probably upon the point of making an ass 
of myself.” 

“For instance?” 

“I am ashamed to tell you, but I will 
confess one or two instances. Last winter 
at the Principals conference things seemed 
to be going my way. Some remarks I 
made in one of the discussions took pretty 
well, I was made chairman of a commute, 
the resolution I drew was adopted, and I 
was elected vice-president. It was too 
much for my weak head, and I began to 
foam. Just then some one came up and 
said the new president of Union college 
was over in the corner and would like to 
make my acquaintance. Will you be- 
lieve that I replied that it hardly seemed 
worth while to be introduced where we 
'could only say a word or two : that I would 


ON A TENSION 


87 


C ' 

rather wait till some time when we could 
have opportunity to see more of each 
other?” 

“Pray why did you say that?” 

“I didn’t say it: my bubbling over with 
self-satisfaction said it. I knew even 
when I was saying it how absurd it was, but 
I was in the mood to throw out a half- 
digested thought like that, and so lost the 
resect of my friend and the good will of 
the president of Union.” 

“Give me another instance.” 

“They are humiliating, but I will give 
you one more. When I went to San Fran- 
cisco three years ago I was asked to escort 
two ladies. I did not know them and it 
was rather a formidable undertaking for 
five days, but we proved to be congenial 
and I enjoyed the trip. When we were 
nearly there and were well acquainted we 


88 


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told one another our first impressions, and 
they said that when we took our first meal 
together they remarked to each other, 
‘At any. rate he eats slowly.’ ‘Why, were 
you watching me?’ I exclaimed. ‘Yes, 
indeed, didn’t you know it?’ ‘I never 
thought of that. I was watching you. 
I knew I was all right.’ Can you im- 
agine anybody out of an asylum saying 
that ? It was the bubbling over of exulta- 
tion at having reached such friendly re- 
lations.” 

‘‘You have wandered three thousand 
miles away from your demonstration that 
you paid me a compliment.” 

”0 no: only making my major premise 
clear. Minor premise, I said a most 
ridiculous thing.” 

“Granted, for the sake of the argument.” 

“Conclusion, I feel exstatic, and that 


ON A TENSION 


89 


can be due only to the joy of being with 
you.” 

“Which you illustrate by saying you can 
talk with me any time.” 

“Absolute asininity, therefore complete 
ecstasy.” 

“Provided we walk to Remsen so as 
not to waste the afternoon.” 

“No, I forego Remsen, if only by way 
of expiation.” 

“Then I believe your repentance is 
sincere.” 

“Besides, I foresee that I shall be kept 
pretty busy just talking with you.” 

“Is it formidable?” 

t “Far from it, and it will give me just 
as exhilarating a fatigue.” 

“Always action, action, action. Why 
couldn’t we be contented just to be to- 
gether this afternoon without such con- 


90 


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tinual sparring ? Did you never enjoy the 
silence of companionship?” 

“That sounds like a paradox.” 

“Far from it. The trouble is, you do 
not know the joys of contemplation. 
You and I have been looking for half an 
hour toward that big tree yonder. What 
impression has it made upon you?” 

“Leaf seven rounded lobes, therefore 
an oak; a tuft of them at the end of a twig, 
therefore quercus alba.” 

“You aren’t looking at the tree; you are 
trying to recall a page of Gray’s Botany. 
It is as if somebody should ask me what 
impression you had made upon me and I 
should reply, ‘Willard, S. A., 219 Adams 
street, teacher.’ ” 

“What impression has the oak made 
on you?” 


ON A TENSION 


91 


“First of its age. The acorn from which 
it sprang must have wormed down into 
the ground and begun to sprout when my 
great grandfather was a child, and the 
tree will still be standing there probably 
long after every thought of me has vanished. 
If it had been a dryad, flow contemptuously 
it would look down on us evanescent 
mortals.” 

“If you were telling the impression I 
have made on you, you say you wouldn’t 
reply by giving my directory address; 
what would you say?” 

“Fishing for compliments or want to 
know really?” 

“Want to know really: this is a serious 
conversation to me.” 

“It isn’t usually prudent to tell one 
frankly what you think of one.” 


92 


ON A TENSION 


“You told Mr. Appleton what you 
thought of me.” 

“How do you know?” 

“He repeated it to me.” 

“That wasn’t nice of him.” 

“I warned him not to betray confidence, 
but he said you spoke openly. Besides, 
he didn’t tell all you said.” 

“What did he tell?” 

“The pleasant things. I had accused 
him of making a mistake in sending you 
here.” 

“Then you weren’t satisfied with me?” 

“I told him you were a Sevres vase in 
a bull pen, and that you looked down on 
the rest of us. To disprove it he told me 
the good things you had said of me.” 

“Why didn’t he tell it all?” 

“I asked him to keep the dark side back: 
just then I did not feel like hearing criti- 


ON A TENSION 


93 


cism. But now it is criticism I want. 
The fact that you feel friendly enough 
toward me to bring me out here and devote 
this afternoon to me is sufficient compli- 
ment. Now I want the downright hard 
truth about my faults.” 

”1 believe you do. I believe you are 
in a mood to profit by criticism.” 

“Just now you could not possibly give 
me a better proof of your friendship.” 

“Well, Mr. Willard, to begin with, you 
have a fundamentally wrong idea of work. 
You are measuring it by quantity, not by 
quality.” 

“For instance.” 

“Take your annotated classics: why do 
you waste time on them?” 

“It isn’t wasted. They fill in the time 
when I am too tired to do anything serious 
and not sleepy enough to go to bed.” 


94 


ON A TENSION 


“And yet you let this banal stuff go 
out as yours : stuff you would not use in 
your own school.” 

“I get a hundred and fifty dollars for 
it.” 

“You don’t need the hundred and fifty 
dollars. You get eighteen hundred dollars 
a year, and you have no one else to sup- 
port.” 

“It costs me a lot for books.” 

“That leads me to your psychology. I 
don’t object so seriously to that. I don’t 
think you will ever get anywhere with it, 
but so long as you enjoy groping it isn’t 
wholly unprofitable amusement: it is well 
enough to have a fad. But when you 
undertake to master all German metaphys- 
ics before you begin to formulate your 
own theory you attempt the impossible. 
Those books and magazine articles come 


OK A TENSION 


95 


out faster than you can read them, and 
every year you will be farther behind. 
You have read enough: stop reading and 
think. Work out your own theory, ex- 
periment upon it, verify it or disprove it: 
but don’t think the mere labor of reading 
all that other people write will make you 
a psychologist.” 

“You don’t sugar-coat your pills, Miss 
Barrett.” 

“It is not a time for sugar-coating. 
There is not likely to be another occasion 
when I am in the mood for doing this 
disagreeable thing and you are in the mood 
to let me. To tell you the bare truth, 
I think that ability which might make 
its mark you are frittering away on a 
mass of useless efforts. When I was a 
child my arithmetic teacher said that a 
great mathematician had declared that 


96 


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if he were given a problem to solve and 
his life depended on whether he solved it 
in an hour, he would spend the first half 
of the hour studying it before he made a 
figure. You wouldn’t. In your phrase 
you would get busy, and perhaps be half 
through before you discovered that you 
could have done it in a much simpler way.” 

“You hit me hard there, Miss Barrett; 
I have had that experience frequently.” 

“It comes from not having formed the 
habit of contemplation. I don’t approve 
of tobacco, but I have sometimes envied 
the dolce far niente of an after-dinner 
cigar. For you the Italian phrase just 
expresses it. If only you could find it 
sweet to do nothing for occasional intervals, 
and escape this everlasting keeping busy, 
busy, busy. Work is of no use unless it 
leads to something. Don’t start any 


OK A TEKSIOK 


97 


work unless you are sure it leads to some- 
thing worth while.” 

“The world needs men who do things.” 

“The world needs men who get things 
done. It is full of men who are hustling 
and puffing and sweating, keeping every- 
thing in a turmoil but never getting 
anywhere.” 

“You can’t get anywhere unless you 
start.” 

“And you won’t get there unless you 
start in the right direction. That is the 
usual trouble. Instead of making sure 
which is the road people keep taking the 
first turn, tiring themselves out, and coming 
back again. Study the map before you 
start.” 

“Lots of people are always planning 
and never beginning.” 


98 


ON A TENSION 


“They accomplish as much as those who 
begin without planning and go wrong.” 

“Don’t you think all honest work counts 
for something?” 

“The greatest waste in the world to-day 
is of effort that is honest but misdirected. 
Often it is a serious and positive harm.” 

“And most of my effort is misdirected?” 

“I think so.” 

“Toward what would you advise me to 
direct it?” 

“Toward what you are paid for and 
responsible for.” 

“Do you mean that I neglect my work 
as a teacher?” 

“I mean that you are not a teacher at 
all, or interested in being.” 

“You told Mr. Appleton that you never 
saw a school run so like clock-work.” 

“President Garfield said his idea of a 


ON A TENSION 


99 


college was a log with Mark Hopkins on 
one end and himself on the other; but if 
Mark Hopkins had never done anything 
but sit on the end of a log he would never 
have become a great college president.” 

“And you think I do nothing but sit on 
a log?” 

“As a principal that is about all. You 
are a strong, intelligent, healthy, square 
man whom the boys like and obey because 
they like you, but you give no attention to 
school outside the routine of your day’s 
work. You admit your outside thoughts 
are mostly of your Don Quixote psychol- 
ogy.” 

“But I take up the problems of the school 
as they occur.” 

“And jump at the answers. You were 
wholly wrong in that case of Will Colburn 
and Tom Abemethy.” 


100 


ON A TENSION 


“How do you know ?” 

“I happened to see the affair. Will is a 
big, good-natured, curly-headed boy who 
likes you and wouldn’t take the trouble to 
explain that you pronounced the verdict 
after hearing only Tom’s story. Will doesn’t 
care, but you hurt Tom by siding with him 
unjustly.’’ 

“I may have been hasty there, but such 
cases do not occur often. Surely I get 
good results in the classroom.” 

“Not so very. You inspire your pupils 
so that they work hard and grub all they 
can out of the text-book, but you leave 
their information ragged. I was astonished 
in looking over your algebra papers to find 
such evidence of neglect: Mary Bowerman, 
for instance, showing plainly in her bino- 
mial therorem that she was uncertain in 
the subtraction of exponents.” 


ON A TENSION 


101 


“I always explain when a pupil shows 
that he does not understand.” 

“But you don’t take pains enough to 
find out when your pupils do not under- 
stand. You talk and demonstrate a good 
deal, and you do it well and interestingly 
and helpfully, but you don’t question 
enough to be sure you are followed. And 
while it is true you do explain if you are 
asked to, you have the manner of being 
interrupted unnecessarily, so that the pupil 
feels apologetic and next time keeps quiet.” 

“What would you have me do?” 

“Give more time and thought to your 
work. You seem to think that teaching 
has no problems: that you can deal off- 
hand with every question that comes up 
and trust to instinct to hit on the right 
solution. It is a big responsibility to be 
at the head of a school like this, and it 


102 


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deserves your most serious consideration. 
For instance, to take a more important 
matter, what right have you to allow Miss 
Caswell to remain a teacher in your school ?” 

“Why, I don’t hire the teachers, Miss 
Barrett.” 

“But you ought to prevent her being 
hired.” 

“My dear Miss Barrett, Miss Caswell is 
the niece of the president of the board, 
who would have to support her mother if 
she did not earn four hundred dollars in 
school.” 

“What of it? She is an incubus, isn’t 
she ? She deadens the soul of every child 
that enters her room, doesn’t she? You 
have three unusually desirable primary 
teachers, delightful girls, competent and 
bright and loving their children, so that the 
little tots long to come to school. Then 


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103 


comes the fourth grade and Miss Caswell, 
a sour old maid without the slightest sense 
of humor or sympathy or love, and there 
those little ones sit for forty weeks terror- 
stricken, not nearly as well fitted to enter 
the fifth grade as when they came out of 
the third. Isn’t that true?” 

“You put it strongly, but it is true.” 

“And you, the principal of the school, 
permit it.” 

“I can’t help it. Mr. Pritchard is a 
domineering man, and he is president of 
the biggest bank in town. He loans 
money to five of the other eight members 
of the board. Do you suppose they would 
dare vote against him?” 

“Mr. Pritchard is a bully, and all bullies 
are cowards. Go to him and demand that 
Miss Caswell resign and he will threaten to 
dismiss you. Tell him that if he does the 


104 


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town will know why, and will have statis- 
tics as to how much it has paid to relieve 
him from supporting his own sister; he will 
whine like a hound and beg you not to 
mention it.” 

“How keen you are, Miss Barrett. I 
don’t say I should like to undertake it 
but very likely it would work just that 
way.” 

“Probably that isn’t the best way to go 
at it, but it shows you one possibility. At 
any rate, some way or other you should 
rid the school of that cold-blooded reptile. 
Who is your best friend on the board? 

“Mr. Boutelle.” 

“You talk to him pretty freely, don’t 
you?” 

“Absolutely freely, about school mat- 
ters.” 

“Ask him what to do in this matter. 


ON A TENSION 


105 


Talk it over, plan a campaign, get her out, 
if it takes a year to do it. This illustrates 
what I was saying, that you don’t give 
time to the problems of the school. They 
can’t all be solved off-hand: if they could, 
anybody could be a good principal. It 
is because the problems are difficult and 
take time and sagacity and determination 
and perseverance, that the right man rises 
in his calling. You can be a distinguished 
teacher if you will concentrate on it. But 
you must concentrate.” 

‘‘Miss Barrett, I will concentrate. You 
convince me that I am not even honest 
with the school : I am not earning the salary 
I am paid. How ridiculous it seems that 
your name should be printed in the cata- 
logues as my assistant. You would be 
worth a dozen of me as principal.” 

‘‘Not a bit of it. I couldn’t do it as 


106 


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you can. I can see some things that 
ought to be done because I am in the 
habit of seeing and reflecting. The more 
you get into the habit of reflecting instead 
of being busy all the time, the more you will 
see; and when you see, with your personal- 
ity and your energy you can accomplish 
as no woman could, as few men could.” 

“If I may always have you by my side, 
Miss Barrett — ” 

“There come the others back. They look 
as if they had been having a happy after- 
noon, too.” 

VI 

Mrs. Leander Barrett 
invites you to the marriage of her 
daughter 
Rebecca 
to 

Hermon Willard 


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107 


at her home in 
Worcester, Mass. 

June the twenty-seventh, 1906 
Receptions the Saturdays of September 
219 Adams street 
Braintree, N. Y. 



Bread upon the Waters 















BREAD UPON THE WATERS 

I 

“Elihu! halloa, there! do you mean to 
say you don’t know me?” 

“I know you well enough, Ben, but the 
fact is I’m ashamed to meet any ’98 man, 
most of all you.” 

“Well, you’ve met one, and you’re going 
to take lunch with him on the spot.” 

“I can surprise you.” 

“Go ahead.” 

“If I take lunch with you it will be the 
first food I have eaten in twenty-four 
hours.” 

“So down on your luck as that, old 
man?” 

“Yes, I have exhausted borrowing and 
( 111 ) 


112 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


begging and have got to the starving stage.’ ’ 

“You won’t starve to-day if Marquand 
has anything left. What has gone wrong 
with you?” 

“Everything. You know my wife and 
I are divorced.” 

“Yes, I heard that: sorry for you, old 
chap.” 

“Everybody sides with her, and her 
people are influential, so I have no show 
any more.” 

“Here we are. There’s a table in the 
comer just vacated: we can have a quiet 
chat there, and we’ll make this meal a 
leisurely one. Remember the last meal 
we had together ? Hasty pudding without 
molasses. We shall do better than that 
to-day. Here, waiter, Blue points, planked 
white-fish, sweetbreads on toast, and as- 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


113 


paragus. Now tell us what has happened 
to you since we left college.’ ’ 

“I started out well enough: instructor 
at Union, and after two years assistant 
professor. Then I married and we went 
travelling. Spent a year in London and 
Paris and Berlin and Vienna; then up the 
Nile, back by India, China, and Japan. 
By the end of the second year we had 
agreed to disagree, and we were divorced. 
I had taken thousands of views and I tried 
lecturing: nobody wanted to hear me talk. 
Then I tried writing for the magazines: 
nobody wanted to print it. I even at- 
tempted newspaper work; but they sent 
me off on impossible stunts and tossed my 
stories into the waste-basket. By this 
time my money was gone, and I began to 
hang up anybody I met for a meal. After 
a while that wouldn’t work, and I began 


114 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


to borrow the price of a meal. I couldn’t 
pay back, and I began to beg of anybody I 
knew. People avoided me, sometimes re- 
fused me. Last night I hesitated a good 
while whether to put my last fifteen cents 
into a supper or a bed. I decided it was 
too cold to sleep in a park, so I went with- 
out supper. Now you know my history 
up to date.” 

“But, Elihu, this all seems incredible. 
You, one of the bright men of the class, 
starving on Broadway like a tramp. There 
must be lots of things you can do.” 

“Are there? I don’t run across them. 
I have tried over and over. The Herald 
every morning has advertisements for 
hundreds of men wanted. I have applied 
again and again, only to find a score of men 
waiting, any one of whom is taken before 
me. I am not proud. If I ever had been 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


115 


it would have been washed out of me long 
ago. I am willing to be a porter, a messen- 
ger, a street sweeper, anything that will 
bring me a bed and a dinner, but there are 
so many more for every place who look 
younger and more prosperous, that I am 
turned down. No: I have tried over and 
over, and I have given up hoping for work.” 

“What are you looking forward to?” 

“Nothing but the river; some night I 
shall be hungry enough to drop in and end 
it.” 

“And you are the Elihu Trask who used 
to lie back with me in Weld hall and specu- 
late as to how we would open this big 
oyster, the world.” 

“I didn’t have to open it: it was opened 
and handed to me on the half-shell, like 
these Blue points. In our wildest hopes I 


116 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


never dreamed of such chances as I have 
had.” 

“How have you lost them?” 

“I have often asked that of myself. I 
have no small vices : I don’t drink or smoke 
or notice a woman I can’t respect. I was 
never extravagant : quite the contrary, you 
are thinking of yourself, and rightly. But 
some way I have never been able to hold 
my friends. You have picked me up to- 
day out of curiosity, and are feeding me for 
the sake of old times, but you despise me; 
you wouldn’t like to meet me again to- 
morrow. Yet you gave up going to Yale 
to room with me at Harvard. And before 
the year was ended we were more strangers 
than if we had never met.” 

“It wasn’t all my fault, Elihu.” 

“It wasn’t your fault at all, Ben. You 
were staunch enough. But after we had 


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117 


boarded ourselves so parsimoniously it 
was sneaky for me to let Bill Morgan pay 
my board at the Pi Etas, and leave you to 
eat your mush alone.” 

“I did not lay it up against you, Elihu. I 
was glad you had the chance to get such 
substantial food.” 

“I know it; I know it; you were always 
generous. Then when I told you Bill 
wanted to room with me, and you asked 
where, and I said No. 7, Weld hall, you 
moved your things out and never made a 
whimper.” 

“I saw we had both been mistaken in 
each other.” 

“I wasn’t mistaken in you: I knew you 
were true blue; but Bill Morgan had piles 
of money, and he lavished lots of it on me. 
‘Might as well spend it on you as taking 
some fast girl to ride,’ he used to say. 


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‘More respectable and really lots of fun.’ 
You wouldn’t let him pay your board and 
buy your clothes, but so long as he wanted 
to do it and could afford it, I didn’t see 
why I shouldn’t let him.” 

“How did you come to separate?” 

‘‘Same old fatality. He got tired of me 
and moved out before the year was over. 
But he was square about it: he gave me 
the twenty dollars a week all through col- 
lege. He said he had got me into that 
way of living and he would see me through.” 

‘‘He got you into the first ten in the In- 
stitute.” 

‘‘Yes, and I ought to have helped you in, 
but I didn’t; I kept you out of Pudding.” 

“I always suspected that.” 

‘‘It was true. It is hard to forgive a man 
you have injured and I never forgave you : 
I haven’t yet.” 


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119 


“O that’s so long ago, Elihu; let by-gones 
be by-gones. We were boys then.” 

“I am far enough from a boy now. It 
hardly seems possible that I could once 
have been ambitious, hopeful, confident. 
Now the principal thought I have as a 
background to this white-fish is that I shall 
never have another meal like this.” 

“You will have lots of them. Suppose 
I give you something to do ?” 

“You? What, pray?” 

“I am principal of the school at Shirley, 
and was sent down here to-day to get a 
new preceptress. I have met one who will 
do very well, and am to telephone her to- 
night. She does not need the place as you 
do. Take the place yourself: be my vice- 
principal. The salary is only eighty dol- 
lars a month, but that is better than starv- 
ing.” 


120 


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“It would be absolute heaven to me after 
my last six months. But could I do the 
work?” 

“An ex-professor of Union, and mostly 
the same subject?” 

“But the government?” 

“How did you get on at Union?” 

“Fairly well the first two years. Not 
much more than tolerated, but that is all 
a tutor expects. After that it didn’t go so 
well. I was never popular, and the last 
year I was disliked. If I had stayed an- 
other year I should have been hooted.” 

“What was the trouble?” 

“Fundamentally the boys thought I 
wasn’t fair: that I favored the sons of rich 
parents, especially if they showed me hos- 
pitality.” 

“Was it true?” 

“In some instances, enough to start the 


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121 


feeling; and you know how that accumu- 
lates in college, like a snowball.” 

“At any rate you will know how to avoid 
that mistake here. In our school disci- 
pline is easy; in fact we don’t think much 
about it. We are all pretty busy, and you 
will make your classes the most interesting 
in school.” 

“Do you really want me to come?” 

“I shall be delighted to have you.” 

“You are authorized to engage?” 

“Yes.” 

“To begin when?” 

“Next Monday.” 

“I couldn’t go in these clothes, and I 
have no others, not even a clean shirt.” 

“I haven’t much money with me, but 
my credit it good as Wanamaker’s. I 
will take you up there and ask them to 


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give you a hundred dollars worth of outfit 
and charge it to me.” 

“Do you expect to get your pay?” 

“Yes, at your convenience. I can wait 
a year.” 

“Ben, I wish I was a good enough fellow 
to refuse.” 

“But you won’t refuse. Come, we will 
end with strawberry shortcake, if it is an 
extravagance, and then we will run up to 
Ninth street.” 

II 

Ben Ford was certainly forgiving. He 
had fitted for Yale, where he and Elihu, 
who had struck up an intimacy in the last 
year at the academy, had agreed to room 
together. During vacation Elihu had 
come to him and announced that he had 
decided to go to Harvard instead, and 
hoped Ben would go with him. Against 


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123 


all his family traditions Ben agreed to the 
change, not considering that if either was 
to determine the college for both it should 
not have been Elihu, who had no family 
traditions. 

They had not hoped to room on the cam- 
pus freshmen year, but a friend of Ben’s 
had been forced at the last moment to give 
up his college course, and as most of the 
students had made their arrangements for 
the year, he had been able to turn over to 
Ben a fine room in Weld hall. The first 
rift within the lute had come over the car- 
pet in this room. It had cost fifty dollars, 
had only a year’s light wear, and was of- 
fered to them for ten dollars. Ben thought 
they ought to have it, and that they could 
afford five dollars apiece. Elihu thought 
it would be an attraction and perhaps a 
protection, as the room was on the ground 


124 


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floor and might be damp, but it was not an 
absolute necessity and he did not feel like 
putting up five dollars. Ben had come to 
college with fifty dollars as his total capital, 
and Elihu with five hundred, yet Elihu 
was manifestly glad when Ben decided to 
pay the ten dollars himself. 

They had agreed to the narrowest econ- 
omy in food. At first they lived on a loaf 
of graham bread shared between them 
three times a day. But this cost each of 
them twelve cents a day, and they found 
books so expensive that they felt they 
must economize more closely. They lived 
for a week or two on mush and molasses ; 
one week they even lived on mush without 
molasses. They were strong and healthy 
and of good habits, and they thrived on it. 

But one day Elihu came home and told 
Ben he was going to board at the Pi Etas. 


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125 


“At the Pi Etas, at twenty dollars a. 
week? Where do you get your money ?”* 
laughed Ben, who thought it was joke. 

It was no joke. Elihu had attracted 
the notice of Bill Morgan, a wealthy fellow 
of benevolent disposition who thought it 
was a shame that so good a scholar should 
feed on Indian meal, and who proposed to 
have him come to his boarding table at his 
expense. Elihu had protested feebly, but 
had been persuaded and had accepted a 
hundred dollar bill to pay his first five 
weeks’ board. 

Ben could not understand Elihu’s will- 
ingness to incur such obligation or to desert 
his comrade, but he was glad for Elihu’s 
sake that he was to be well fed, and he did 
not let it make the slightest difference in 
feeling toward him. 

But Elihu’s interest in his roommate 


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weakened. In the new set into which he 
was introduced, his big uncouthness and 
clumsiness seemed a fit setting for his can- 
did bluntness, especially in referring to 
himself. He lacked humor, but he did 
not hesitate to confess he did not see the 
point of a joke and was often more amusing 
in his frank opacity than he would have 
been as a wit. He had the effect of a fresh 
breeze in an overheated room, and became 
quite the vogue. He was one of the first 
ten taken into the Institute, and became a 
man of influence in his class. Morgan 
took him to his own tailor and paid the 
bills. One could hardly recognize the 
countryman who shambled into the yard 
in September. 

One day Elihu was thoughtful and Ben 
could see that he had something on his 
mind. 


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127 


“What is it, Elihu?” he asked at length 
“Yon might as well out with it.” 

“Well, the fact is,” Elihu began shame- 
facedly, “Morgan wants me to room with 
him.” 

“Over in Beck? That will be going 
some.” 

“No; he has a notion of living the simple 
life; he wants to come here.” 

“To this room?” 

“Yes.” 

“And of course you want me to move 
out ?” 

“It seems churlish, but it would mean a 
lot to me to room with him.” 

Ben’s pride was his weakness; if any- 
body he had trusted demanded the unrea- 
sonable he did not argue or protest: he 
yielded and knew the man better. 


128 


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“I will move out to-night,” he said. And 
before dark his few simple belongings were 
crowded into a hall bedroom in a cheap 
boarding-house. Had he not succeeded in 
getting some tutoring he could not have 
afforded even that. 

This was the end of the friendship for 
which he had changed his college. He 
and Elihu always bowed but never spoke. 
As successive tens were taken into the In- 
stitute he felt rather than knew that it was 
Elihu’ s influence that kept him out. Oc- 
casionally when acquaintance started 
with some man who seemed congenial but 
was in Elihu ’s set he found it suddenly 
checked, and did not doubt that Elihu had 
done him an ill turn. If Elihu’s prosperity 
had continued Ben would have been the 
one to avoid a meeting, but when he saw 
his old classmate friendless, in rags, and 


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129 


hungry, he forgot all his disappointment in 
him and held out the helping hand. 

Ill 

The experiment proved a success. Elihu 
was not a teacher and never could be: he 
was too self-centered, too immersed in his 
own view of the subject, regarding the 
day’s recitation as a means of widening his 
own knowledge rather than of helping his 
pupils to knowledge. But his scholarship 
was accurate, the boys did not catch him 
in mistakes, and the spirit of the school 
was so good that his classes maintained the 
habit of making good preparation. And 
certainly Elihu was interesting. He had 
travelled so much that he could illustrate 
any geographical reference by his own ex- 
periences. He became popular with the 
pupils and presently with their parents. 
Ben blessed his lucky stars over and over 


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that he had happened to be in New York 
and to meet his old chum at a time when 
he could do so much for him. 

Elihu, was grateful, of course. “I say, 
Ben,” he said after a month, “you cer- 
tainly have a snug nest here. All the 
board or the boys ask is to find out what 
you want and you get it.” 

“It is a delightful place,” replied Ben, 
“but you haven’t seen the most delightful 
thing in it. Come with me to-night and I 
will introduce you to the woman who is to 
be my wife next June.” 

They called upon her, and Elihu felic- 
itated his old comrade. “Really,” he 
said, “she is a perfect specimen of woman- 
hood. If only I had found such a woman 
instead of a haughty society girl. By the 
way, nobody here knows that I have been 
married; of course you won’t mention it.” 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


131 


“Certainly not, Elihu; I have never be- 
fore alluded to it even with you.” There 
was a reason for it. The newspapers had 
published at the time that she paid her 
husband ten thousand dollars to permit 
the divorce. Fortunately they lived in a 
state where desertion was sufficient cause. 

“It was the unhappiest feature of an 
unhappy life. How everything seems to 
to come your way.” 

“Yes, I have been blessed, Elihu, way 
beyond my deserts. We have waited 
longer than some would think wise, but I 
wanted to have enough saved to be sure I 
could take good care of her and all that 
may come to us. Now I have five thou- 
sand dollars in the bank, and life insur- 
ance for twenty thousand, so that I feel 
that I may safely assume the responsibility. 
I have led a cleaner life than most men, 


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Elihu, and you may imagine what it means 
to have such a woman my very own.” 

IV 

After a time it began to dawn upon Ben 
that perhaps Elihu was too popular. He 
was glad to have his protege recognized 
and liked, but he was hardly prepared to 
have his own place usurped. Elihu had 
advantages. In the first place he was 
three inches taller, and though he had a 
shambling gait and carriage this seemed 
to many the athlete’s lounge, and a story 
spread about that Elihu had been on the 
varsity crew. Ben was five feet seven, 
an average height, well formed, erect, 
brisk, and sure in movement: among his 
boys he had seemed a large man: but be- 
side this big fellow, five feet ten and looking 
six feet, the principal seemed to shrink. 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


133 


Then Elihu was much better dressed. 
He had put Ben’s hundred dollars to good 
use. His clothes were ready-made, but 
they had been skilfully altered to fit him, 
and were of the latest cut, while his shirts 
and shoes and hat carried an air of distinc- 
tion. Ben was always neat, with clean 
linen and polished shoes, and his clothes 
had been made by a good tailor. But in 
this as in all else he was saving; he wore 
his clothes a long while ; he seemed a coun- 
tryman beside Elihu. 

Elihu got a hold in village society that 
Ben had never secured. His school duties 
did not worry him after four o’clock and 
he had plenty of time for visiting; he liked 
to be invited out to teas and dinners. As 
a man who had been everywhere and seen 
everything he always found listeners, and 
he was entertaining. It happened that 


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the president of the board, who really had 
entire control, had concentrated all the 
poetry of his life on travel. He had made 
a dozen short trips to Europe and Africa, 
had carried a camera and brought home 
every tram-ticket and laundry bill and 
pasted all his mementoes in scrap-books, 
one for each voyage ; he liked nothing else 
so much as to find a listener to go over 
these books with him. Elihu not only 
listened to him, but had recollections of his 
own for every page, and was soon invited 
to go with the president to Norway and 
Sweden the coming summer, all expenses 
paid. 

The most direct contrast was drawn in 
the lecture course. The brilliant Professor 
Bright, who held the audience so spell- 
bound as he told of the new astronomy, 
when he saw Elihu enter the hall came 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


135 


down from the platform to greet him, in- 
sisted on taking him back to sit with him, 
and explained to the president of the board 
that they had been classmates at Harvard. 

“Then there is another man you will 
want to see,” said the president after the 
lecture. “Here is another of your class- 
mates.” And he brought up Ben. 

“Dear me, yes,” said the lecturer, em- 
barrassed. “Let me see, I forget your 
name.” When he heard it, “Yes,” he said, 
“I remember, I think, but there are so 
many in the class it is difficult to recall 
faces.” 

A good deal was made of this incident, 
and Ben began to fall into an inferior place 
in public estimation. 

V 

One evening Elihu surprised Agatha 
Wallace by calling unaccompanied upon 


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her. He had come frequently with Ben, 
sometimes by Ben’s invitation, sometimes 
by his own, but this was the first time he 
had come alone. She felt affronted; as an 
engaged girl she did not care to have any 
outside man visit her, even Ben’s friend. 
But Elihu explained that he had come when 
he knew Ben was away because it was 
Ben he wanted to talk about. That put 
a new phase on it, and Agatha became 
cordial. 

“I don’t need to tell you,” he began, 
“what a fine fellow Ben is, though I have 
known him longer and on more sides than 
you. But there is one thing that troubles 
me here. He is an able principal and a 
remarkable teacher, but instead of giving 
all his energy to that work he is weighed 
down by a mass of clerical details that keep 
him overtime, make him tired and nervous, 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


137 


and instead of giving him a chance to 
broaden, confine him to pawing day after 
day in the same old treadmill.” 

Agatha acknowledged the truth of that ; 
she had often wished she could help him 
with this drudgery of school work. 

“It i&n’t economy for the board of edu- 
cation,” Elihu continued. “When my 
father was a boy he held the chain for 
George Raymond, a civil engineer in Fitch- 
burg, who was taking some measurements 
for Alva Crocker, the richest man in town. 
One day he wanted to find a monument, 
so he borrowed a shovel and worked all the 
forenoon like a common laborer, digging 
ten feet down. ‘Why do you do that?’ 
my father asked. ‘I told Alva Crocker I 
needed a man,’ he replied, ‘and he thought 
it wouldn’t be necessary. If he wants to 
pay me ten dollars a day to do what a 


138 


BREAD IJPOiT THE WATERS 


laborer would do for one, I don’t care.’ 
That is just what the board is doing here. 
It is paying him eighteen hundred dollars 
a year to do clerical work that dozens of 
girls could do just as well for six dollars a 
week.” 

Agatha admitted that this was true. 

“I never thought much of Timothy Tit- 
comb, but he said one thing I have always 
remembered, that it is characteristic of an 
executive not to do anything he can get 
anybody else to do. That is so here. 
There is a great deal in school that nobody 
else but Ben can do, and he should be left 
free to do that, without dissipating his 
energy on calculating averages and making 
out regents reports.” 

“I wish some change could be made,” 
Agatha remarked, “but the board is so 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


139 


parsimonious when any new expense is. 
proposed.” 

‘‘I am not so sure about that, Miss Wal- 
lace. I have taken the liberty to speak to 
Col. Manning about it, and he has promised 
to see that at the meeting to-morrow night 
a clerk is elected for Ben, to take all this 
detail off his mind.” 

“He has promised? How good you are, 
Mr. Trask. It will make such a difference 
to Ben. Whom will they appoint?” 

“That is just why I am calling to-night. 
There is about a half-day’s work, and my 
proposition was that you should be chosen, 
to be there in the morning only, at three 
hundred dollars a year. Are you willing 
to accept?” 

“It is too good to be true. Ben never 
wanted me to be a teacher, but he will be 
delighted to have me do this. As for me. 


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it will be in every way a joy. Does Ben 
know you have done this for him?” 

“No; and he mustn’t: let him think it 
comes from the board spontaneously. He 
has done so much for me that a little thing 
like this doesn’t count, and you must 
promise he shall never know.” 

How generous he was; doubtless he was 
doing these kind things all the time and 
concealing them. This big-heartedness 
appealed to Agatha. Think how many 
times Ben had discussed with her the little 
hundred dollars he had lent Elihu, and here 
Elihu made Ben a present of three hundred 
dollars a year and didn’t even want it 
known. It was good to be a careful man 
like Ben, but sometimes she wished his 
outlook was broader. A woman so ad- 
mires the open hand, the uncalculating 
generosity. She was so occupied with the 


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141 


contrast between the two friends that she.' 
did not at first observe how at parting 
Elihu was holding her hand longer than was. 
customary. When she drew it away she 
was angry to find herself blushing, and 
angrier still when he gave her hand an ex- 
tra pressure just before releasing it, be- 
cause she felt herself blushing still more 
deeply. Why should it seem personal to 
her? Elihu was doing all this for Ben. 

VI 

When she came to spend her mornings 
at school Agatha was astonished to find 
how much less Ben was held in respect 
than she supposed. To her mind he had 
always been the big man of the village, 
adored by the pupils and respected by the 
parents. But as she sat at her work in 
the office she could but observe that the 
respect paid to Ben was perfunctory. If 


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Ben and Elihu were both in the office, it 
was Elihu that dominated. He did not 
assume authority or importance, he was 
always deferent to Ben, yet the habit of 
turning to Elihu as the more important 
man was so pervasive that even Agatha 
found herself now and then asking Elihu 
instead of Ben. 

To help Ben out, Elihu had voluntarily 
assumed the rehearsals for commencement, 
and the boys came one by one to the office 
for an hour’s drill, between eleven and 
twelve. The first boy remarked as he 
entered that it hardly seemed necessary, 
as Mr. Ford had already given him the help 
needed. 

“So much the better,’’ replied Elihu 
cordially; “but give me a chance to enjoy 
the finished product.’’ And he asked the 


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143 


boy to go over his oration just as he in- 
tended to deliver it. 

He listened attentively, made some notes 
and at the end remarked: “Very good; 
very good. But I wonder if we can’t put 
a little more snap into it. Take that first 
sentence! ‘Man is the only thinking ani- 
mal.’ That is true, but can’t we make it 
more forcible? For instance, how does 
an animal differ from man?” 

“It can’t think.” 

“And how does the plant differ from the 
animal?” 

“It can’t move.” 

“And how does the mineral differ from 
the plant?” 

“It can’t grow.” 

“Exactly. Now why not put this idea 
of yours into forcible form? Suppose we 


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begin by saying: ‘Minerals exist.’ Then 
what would you say next?” 

“Plants exist and grow.” 

“Perfect. And next?” 

“Animals exist and grow and move.” 

“Right. And finally?” 

“Man exists and grows and moves and 
thinks.” 

“That would do, but suppose we give 
more variety to the expression. Let us 
make the first sentence, ‘Minerals exist, 
plants exist and grow, animals exist and 
grow and move, but man alone has the 
power to think.’ Isn’t that better?” 

“Ever so much better, but Mr. Ford 
didn’t correct me that way: he just marked 
the mistakes in grammar and spelling.” 

“Very right that was, too: all that has 
to be done. But now let us go on and see 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


145 


if we cannot make the phrasing more felici- 
tous. Take the next paragraph.” 

So he went on turning the simple sen- 
tences into epigrams, and converting a 
schoolboy’s essay into a senior theme at 
Harvard. When all was done this oration 
and the rest Elihu corrected had lost the 
smack of originality, to become conven- 
tional, rather flippant expressions of opin- 
ions by Elihu. But to the boys it was a 
great triumph to find that they could write 
such fine English, and they contrasted Mr. 
Trask’s drill with Mr. Ford’s, much to the 
latter’s disadvantage. Even Agatha with 
all her prejudice wondered that it never 
had occurred to Ben to drill pupils in that 
developing, inspiring way. 

VII 

A month later when Ben had gone to 
Ipswich as a judge in prize-speaking and 


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was to remain all night, Elihu called again 
on Agatha. “I knew you would be lonely 
with Ben out of town,” he said, “and I 
have come around to rattle in his shoes.” 

Agatha looked at Elihu’s number tens, 
D width, and thought what an advantage 
it was to have a big, generous, capacious 
foot, a broad understanding. Ben’s one 
personal vanity was the size of his hands 
and feet. He wore number seven gloves 
and number seven shoes, narrow width. 
It must be confessed, Agatha thought, this 
was effeminate; why should a grown man, 
who is supposed tb do things in the world, 
have a hand and foot like a school-girl’s ? 

It had been a hard day. Agatha had 
gone back to school in the afternoon to 
enter some records Ben wanted to com- 
plete, she felt overworked and nervous, 
and Ben was pressed for time on account 


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147 


of his approaching trip to Ipswich. Her 
work was unusually imperfect and he was 
unusually critical: they came nearer than 
ever before in their acquaintance to sharp 
words, and Agatha felt conscious of Ben’s 
self-repression as well as her own. It 
made her tremble for their future. Why 
should it be such an unpardonable offence 
to make the first indentation eleven six- 
teenths of an inch instead of three-quar- 
ters ? It certainly wasn’t worth being 
disagreeable about. 

Elihu proved a delightful relief. He 
told her about his trip up the Nile, and it 
was refreshing to Agatha to reflect that 
anywhere in the world there were people 
who took life as easy as that without this 
everlasting stress and worry. Elihu must 
be such a delightful companion, always 
liesurely and easy-going, enjoying the big 


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things of life and letting the little men — the 
careful men, Agatha specified to herself 
bitterly — lose themselves in agonizing over 
details. She would like to go up the Nile 
with a party of whom Elihu was one. In 
fact it would be enjoyment to go anywhere 
with him. If only — . But she caught her- 
self in time to fracture the thought. What 
was there in her to interest a big, noble fel- 
low like Elihu, even if she had had no other 
tie ? He had not since pressed her hand as 
he did the first night he called. He would- 
n’t to-night, of course; she half wished he 
would, though she knew she should blush 
more deeply than before. No, Ben was 
probably about her size. It would be a 
miserable, grovelling life with him, but it 
was all she was fitted for. Some girl with 
a soul as big as his own would capture 
Elihu. 


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149 


When he rose to go he did hold out his 
hand again, and he did press hers again: 
and when she blushed furiously and sought 
to withdraw it he still held on to it, looking 
straight in her eyes that could not meet his. 
When she looked up he dropped her hand 
and held out his arms. She hid her face 
in his shoulder. “I couldn’t help it, could 
I?” she sobbed. 

VIII 

The next evening was board meeting, 
and the teachers were to be elected for the 
coming year. When Ben got back from 
Ipswich he called on Col. Manning, think- 
ing that as usual the Colonel would want 
to talk over the appointments. But Col. 
Manning did not allude to the election, and 
Ben was too proud to run the risk of seem- 
ing to offer advice unless it was asked. As 
the afternoon passed he wondered that he 


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was not as usual invited to the board meet- 
ing: he even staid at home till nine o’clock 
so that if a messenger was sent for him he 
would be sure to be within call. No word 
came, and he took it for granted all the 
teachers were to be re-elected: still he 
thought he might have been consulted as 
to whether the salaries of any ought to be 
raised. 

When the clock struck nine he felt free 
to call on Agatha. He had been uncom- 
fortable since yesterday afternoon. She 
ought to have been more painstaking when 
she knew she was making entries in a per- 
manent record which he had never before 
trusted to other hands, and she had evi- 
dently been on the point of answering back 
sharply. How unlike her that seemed. 
But he had doubtless spoken impatiently 
himself, and he wanted to apologize and 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


151 


get back to the restful feeling of perfect 
trust. Things had not gone well lately. 
He had felt the school slipping away from 
him. He had not been up to his usual 
standard. Probably he ought not to have 
worked last vacation, but it was partly to 
lay aside money for the vacation to come, 
when Agatha was to be his companion. 
To think of her being his, his to be with 
every hour of the day. The thought of 
annoyances vanished as he reflected on this 
blessing just coming within his grasp. 
There had never been another woman like 
Agatha. How fortunate that to her he 
was the one man in all the world. 

But when he met her she refused his 
proffered kiss. “No, Ben,” she said sadly, 
“that can never be again. You must re- 
lease me from my engagement.” 

“Nonsense, Agatha,” he exclaimed. 


152 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


smiling indulgently. “I was cross and 
rude and bearish yesterday, but I was tired 
and not myself. I apologize.” And he 
held out his arms again. 

“No, Ben,” she said, “it wasn’t that. I 
did my work carelessly and you were right 
to reprove me. I am an employe of the 
board, and it is your place to see that I do 
my work well. No, this goes deeper than 
that. I find that I have mistaken my feel- 
ings. I could not be happy with you. I 
do not love you.” 

If he had been normally master of himself 
perhaps Ben would not have let his pride 
master him, but everything had gone 
against him lately and this seemed the last 
straw. “Of course if you are sure of that,” 
he said, “there is no need of further words 
and he rose to go. 

Just then the bell rang and Elihu came 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


153 


in. “I thought I should find you here,” 
he said, “and I have a message for you 
from the board.” 

“A message from the board, through 
you?” Ben asked wondering. 

“Yes, the board asked me to meet with 
them to-night to talk over the teachers for 
next year. They were good enough to 
elect me principal, but I insisted that they 
should make you vice-principal in my place, 
at the same salary I am receiving, and the 
vote was unanimous. So they asked me 
to let you know at once, because if you de- 
cline I am authorized to hire a woman to 
fill the place.” 

In the mood Ben was in this news was 
welcome: it made the situation complete. 

“You may look about for your woman 
teacher,” he said; “I shall not remain here.” 

They walked out together. “It looks a 


154 BREAD UPON THE WATERS 

little shabby to supplant you this way,” 
Elihu remarked as they started down the 
street. “But it is really a great chance for 
me, and you with your fine record can get 
a place almost anywhere.” 

“O pray don’t mind me in the least,” 
replied Ben; adding with sincerity, “I hope 
you will make an admirable principal.” 

“I don’t feel quite right about that hun- 
dred dollars, either, Ben. Of course I 
could not save much out of my eighty dol- 
lars a month this term, but I could proba- 
bly pay you out of my eighteen hundred 
next year, if it were not that I am about to 
marry.” 

“You marry again ? Why, what are you 
going to live on?” 

“My salary, of course. And then the 
girl has quite a bit of money of her own.” 


“Who is she?” 


BREAD UPON THE WATERS 


155 


“Agatha Wallace.” 

“I hope you will be happy together,” 
said Ben grimly. “Good night.” And he 
turned sharply on his heel. 

The final month was a hard one for him, 
but he gritted his teeth, did every duty 
faithfully to the last, introduced his suc- 
cessor at the close of commencement ex- 
ercises, and then went straight to the train, 
to which all his baggage had already been 
sent, and without telling anybody his pur- 
pose or saying a good-bye he sailed the 
next day for a year in Germany. 

“Well, anyway he left me a snug nest,” 
Elihu reflected, as his wife transferred her 
bank account to him, so that they might 
not be pinched for money during the honey- 


moon. 









































































































A Life for a 





t 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


I 

Miss Brigham opened the schoolhouse 
that morning. She had spent the night 
with the janitor’s wife, who was danger- 
ously ill. A trained nurse was really 
needed, but the janitor could not afford 
to pay twenty-five dollars a week, and 
Miss Brigham, though she lacked the skill, 
made up for it by willingness and sympathy 
and good sense. The janitor had been 
up all night and when he spoke of going 
to the schoolhouse he seemed so exhausted 
that Miss Brigham offered to sweep up 
the school for him : she had been up all 
night too, but women endure better than 


men. 


( 159 ) 


160 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


So she picked up what breakfast she 
could for herself. There wasn’t much: 
only rather heavy bread, a few crackers, 
part of a can of salmon. She would have 
been willing to go out and buy some 
coffee herself, but that would have seemed 
a reflection on his larder, and there wasn’t 
time for it anyway. She would have 
liked some milk, but only a pint had been 
left at the door, and the sick woman might 
need that. So her hunger was only 
meagerly stayed, but she was a cheerful 
body, and she unlocked the schoolhouse 
door blithely. 

It was not a new thing for her to help 
in janitor work. Mr. Chesney found his 
work, like everything in life, rather too 
much for him, and she had not seldom 
helped him to sweep and wash the wood- 
work. She began this morning on the 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


161 


lower floor, sprinkling the cedarwax with 
enjoyment of its pungent odor, and re- 
joicing that the day of feather dusters 
was over. Then she swept the main stairs 
more carefully, and began on the upper 
hall. 

As she came to the principal’s room she 
went in, thinking to sweep that too. As 
the door opened she saw him sitting at 
his table, just as he was sitting when she 
left him the afternoon before. She was 
surprised to find him there so early, and 
was about to apologize and close the door, 
when she observed that he did not lean 
back from the position in which he was 
bending over the desk. She entered the 
room and as she came nearer she saw 
that his eyes were glassy. Glancing up 
she saw a knife plunged into his back 


162 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


between his shoulders. He had been 
murdered. 

II 

If anybody had asked her what she 
would do under such circumstances she 
would have replied that she would scream 
and faint. She did neither. She first 
hastened to see if there was possibility 
of resuscitation. She put her hand upon 
his forehead; it was cold. She felt his 
pulse; it was still. She took from the bag 
on her belt a little mirror and held it to 
his lips; there was no moisture. He was 
dead; hopelessly dead. 

Afterward she remembered that more 
than the horror of the situation she felt 
grief at the cutting off of this young life, 
so promising, so hopeful, so true to grow- 
ing ideals. Her mind went back to the 
Buffalo exposition and to the group of 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


163 


Death and the Sculptor. This death was 
as pitiful as that. 

But with Miss Brigham feelings were 
away in the background when there was 
something to be done. Manifestly the 
first thing was to telephone to the president 
of the board, and at his suggestion while 
he was hurriyng to the schoolhouse she 
telephoned to the coroner. While she 
awaited their coming she took up a writing- 
pad and noted carefully every circumstance 
that might aid in detecting the murderer, 
the exact minute she entered the room, 
the position of the body, the fact that 
there was no single indication of distur- 
bance; that one might have thought he 
was asleep when it happened, and the 
knife had been driven in by a vengeful 
angel. 

The two men came together, and they 


164 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


sought for traces of the murderer. There 
were only two keys to the front door of 
the schoolhouse. One of them the jani- 
tor had given to Miss Brigham; the other 
was kept by the principal and was found 
in his pocket. The front door was locked 
when Miss Brigham came and it was not 
a spring lock : the murderer could not have 
escaped that way. There was a rear 
door, but it was bolted on the inside and 
was found bolted when they looked. 
Every window in the building was held 
down on the inside by a catch. It seemed 
impossible that the assassin could have 
escaped from the schoolhouse ; they almost 
expected as they searched the building 
to find him lurking somewhere. But 
there was no trace of him or of his having 
been there. 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


165 


III 

The president of the board telephoned 
to his wife to go to the janitor’s and care 
for the sick woman while she sent him to 
the building. She had not told him why 
he was summoned, and when he learned 
what had happened his grief was pitiful. 
“He was everybody’s friend,” the janitor 
said; “this school will never get another 
like him. He never talked down to me; 
he always said, ‘Would you mind doing 
so and so?’, just as if he hadn’t a right to 
command me.” 

It seems he and Miss Brigham had left 
the schoolhouse together about half-past 
four, and gone directly to his home, Miss 
Brigham having already been nursing 
his wife more or less for a week. At that 
time he had seen the principal sitting in 
his office, and just as he came away he 


166 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


had noticed that the principal had taken 
up some proof sheets of the new catalogue 
to correct. On examination it appeared 
that this proof had all been corrected, 
a matter of an hour’s work, which seemed 
to indicate half past five as about the 
time of the murder. He had been in the 
habit of working late at the office, some- 
times all night, so his absence had not 
been especially noted at his boarding 
place. It happened that Miss Brigham 
also had seen him in his room just before 
she came away. 

His purse was in his pocket. “The 
motive could not have been robbery,” 
the coroner said. 

“I am not so sure of that,” interrupted 
Miss Brigham. “He always carried five 
twenty-dollar bills in the left-hand upper 
pocket of his waistcoat.” 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


167 


“I never knew that,” said the janitor, 
surprised. 

“There was no reason why you should. 
I happened to know only because once 
when we failed to get our usual fourth- 
Friday pay and I was disturbed at being 
unable to go home over Sunday, he took 
out the neat little leather receptacle in 
which he carried them, and told me that 
he once missed a great opening by not 
having ready money in his pocket, and 
that he then decided never to lose another 
such chance. He added in his kind way 
as he loaned me one of the bills that the 
opportunity to do little favors like that 
came often enough to more than make up 
the interest.” 

“I should have thought he would be 
afraid of being robbed if he was known 
always to have a hundred dollras on his 


168 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


person,” suggested the president of the 
board. 

“No: in the first place very few knew 
it and only those he had occasion to oblige ; 
and in the second place he kept a record 
of the numbers of the bills, so that it would 
not be safe to steal them and pass them.” 

“Where did he keep this record?” 
asked the 'coroner. 

“On the inside cover of the library 
purchase record. Here it is: D5 148973, 
C8763258, B87925436, A2376849, B7689234. 
That last is crossed out: it is probably 
the one he lent to me, and this next, 
C23698423, is probably the one I paid 
him back.” 

There was certainly no such package 
of bills about the dead teacher’s person, 
so this was valuable information. The 
numbers were sent to neighboring banks 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


169 


and printed in advertisements. But noth- 
ing resulted: no such bills were offered 
to any one who had seen the advertisement 
and heeded it. 

An inquest was held, but the only 
possible verdict was that the deceased 
came to his death by person or persons 
unknown. The board of education sent 
to a famous detective bureau, and a pre- 
tentious man came to search for traces. 
When he heard that all the doors and 
windows were fastened he led the way 
to the cellar and pointed out the fresh air 
box of the furnace as the way the murderer 
escaped. It was closed at the outer end 
by wire netting, but the netting was some- 
what loose, and though it seemed incredi- 
ble he declared that the villain had crawled 
out that way. But he got no clue to the 


170 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


scoundrel, and the murder remained an 
unsolved mystery. 


IV 

Perhaps it was partly the shock of the 
event that turned the scales against the 
janitor’s wife. At any rate she died, and 
he was plunged into deeper than his usual 
depression. Miss Brigham did all she 
could to cheer him up, and indeed seemed 
about all in life that was bright to him. 
Within a year she had gradually become 
conscious that his feeling toward her was 
more than gratitude. At first it seemed 
funny, and she joked herself about it; 
but presently she began to recognize it 
as devotion, and it became a serious matter. 
In all her life Miss Brigham had never 
before been a selected one. She was bom 
along in the middle of a large family of 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


171 


children where one of two more or less 
made little difference, and all her life as 
girl, as woman, as teacher in a big school, 
she had felt the same lack of an individual 
recognition. This man was a janitor, 
an uneducated, inefficient, shiftless sort 
of man, but it was something to have even 
him look upon her as the one woman in 
the world. 

Besides, it gave her the opportunity 
of marriage and of children. She had 
long ago given up all hope of being a 
mother. Often and often as she pressed 
some sorrowing little pupil to her breast 
she reflected longingly on the joy it must 
be to have the right to do that any time 
and to have the child your own. That 
joy might come to her now. No matter 
if the janitor was rather a weakling: she 
was strong enough for two and would 


172 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


enjoy sustaining and directing him. Poor 
fellow, life had gone hard enough with 
him so far: it would be a purpose in life 
to give him some happiness, based on 
juster views and higher ideals. 

So when the janitor plucked up courage 
to ask her she did not hesitate. She gave 
herself to him willingly and joyfully, 
determined above all things that he should 
never repent it. 

V 

She had assumed that he would want 
her to resign her place in school and give 
all her time to making his home pleasant. 
His salary was a thousand dollars, and 
on the scale he was accustomed to live 
that would make his life very comfortable. 
But when she spoke of it he expressed 
so pronounced a wish that she should 


A LIFE FOE A LIFE 


173 


continue to teach that she gave up all 
thought of resigning. 

She was more surprised when she brought 
home her first monthly check after their 
marriage to have him suggest that he 
let her deposit it to his own account, so 
as to make it seem more imposing to the 
bank. When she asked if they should 
both check against this account he replied 
that it would be better for her to tell him 
when she wanted to draw money and he 
would give her his own check. She was 
astonished when after rather grudgingly 
giving her several checks, way within 
the amount she had deposited, he one 
day flatly refused a check she asked for, 
telling her it was extravagance. It seemed 
so sordid and contemptible that she would 
not argue with him. Thereafter her pay 
was wholly his. 


174 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


When what had seemed her only re- 
maining hope and solace seemed likely 
to come true and when she told him her 
expectation she thought surely he would 
show possibilities of a loving father. He 
scowled and asked the probable date. 

“Early in July, if all goes well,” she 
replied, her heart sinking. 

“Then you can teach through the year 
all right,” he said relieved, and he did 
not refer to it again. 

She was too proud to protest and she 
taught till the term ended, enduring tor- 
tures to conceal her condition and tortures 
because she could not conceal it. The 
babe was born July 14. “All right; you 
will be able to go into school in September,” 
he said: and once more she was too proud 
to protest. A child was hired to take 
care of the infant during school hours, 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


175 


she drew sixty dollars a month, and she 
handed it to her husband. 

Long before this, of course, illusion had 
departed. She knew that she was married 
to a vulgar, greedy boor, and her one 
dread was to see the father’s traits develop- 
ing in her child. She and her husband 
had grown to live entirely apart. She 
was to him merely a housekeeper who 
worked without pay, and a laborer rented 
out to the school board. Yet she never 
thought of leaving him. She had taken 
him for better or for worse. He had 
turned out to be worse, but she had taken 
him, and what God hath joined let no man 
put asunder. As for the child, all that 
was in her became absorbed in its tiny 
life. 


176 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


VI 

One Sunday afternoon the next spring 
she had started out to make a call when 
she remembered that she had left on the 
kitchen table a letter she had written 
and meant to post. The doors were open 
and her husband did not hear her ligs±i, 
footstep. His back was toward her and 
he was holding the letter in the steam of 
the tea-kettle, unsealing it. She waited 
to see him open the flap and take out the 
letter to read it, and then she noiselessly 
fled, still unseen and unheard, afraid to 
have him turn and know that she had 
discovered so shameful a thing. 

For in the three years they had lived 
together she had never thought of him as 
dishonest. Selfish he was, narrow and 
greedy, but she had never suspected him 
of lying or of any furtive vice. So the 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


177 


discoveiy came to her as a shock. In- 
stead of going to her friend’s she wandered 
off to a piece of woods and hid herself in 
the midst of them and thought and thought 
and thought. The discovery threw a 
new light on all that she knew of her 
husband: it brought into prominence 
many incidents that she had dismissed 
from consideration as incomprehensible. 
What she had reckoned due to his ignorance 
was revealed as shrewd design. The very 
fact that he had concealed from her so 
long his habit of concealing showed that 
she had underrated his intellectual acumen. 
He was not the weakling he seemed: he 
chose to appear so to make things easier 
for him. How true it was that every 
depth had a subcellar. She had thought 
nothing could be more humiliating than 
to have shown such lack of judgment in 


178 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


accepting a husband, but to find herself 
deliberately tricked from the beginning 
and through all these weary months was 
more disgraceful still. She would be on 
her guard now. And she in turn would 
trick him, for he should not know she 
suspected him. 

VII 

A week later news came from her home 
that her mother was ailing and longed 
to see her over Sunday. She was reluc- 
tant to ask her husband for permission 
and money to go, but he surprised her by 
cheerful willingness. He even bought the 
ticket for her, and instead of doling out 
the exact fare back he gave her half a 
dozen times as much as she would need 
and told her she could bring back what 
she did not use. Except for the incident 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


179 


of the letter she would have hoped she 
saw in this a new spirit, but that made 
her wary, so she simply thanked him. 

On the train she kept thinking it over. 
To give her twenty-two dollars when the 
fare back was only three: how could he 
have let nineteen dollars go out of his 
sight over Sunday? 

She took the money out of her pocket 
and looked at it. A twenty and two ones: 
yes, it was all there; how comfortable it 
seemed to have a little more than one’s 
immediate needs. What a pretty thing 
a fresh bright twenty-dollar bill was, and 
how much it represented. Suddenly the 
number caught her eye, and she came near 
screaming: it was one of the five numbers 
in the library purchase record, C23698423, 
the very bill she had paid back to the 
principal. 


180 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


She could hardly believe her eyes. So 
at last there was a clue to the murderer. 
Her husband would remember who paid 
it to him; that man would remember 
where he got it, for twenty-dollar bills 
are scarce in small towns, and eventually 
it would be traced back to the assassin. 
Perhaps it was some one in the town, who 
had concealed the money all this time, 
waiting till remembrance should blow 
over. She wondered who could have 
done it. There was a drunken loafer 
named Dougherty who had a boy in Miss 
Lotrace’s room, and whom the dead 
principal had once found in the hall talking 
insultingly to the teacher. The principal 
had grabbed him by the collar and flung 
him in a heap down the steps. As he got 
up rubbing his knees and shambled off 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


181 


he had threatened bodily damage: could 
he possibly have executed it ? 

O no, that was absurd; the fellow was 
good-natured enough when he was sober; 
besides he wasn’t bright enought to execute 
a deed like that. Even if he had been, 
how could he have got into the schoolhouse 
and out again with all the doors locked. 
In fact how could any body — 

And then her heart stopped short. 
There was one person who could have 
done it; since her discovery of the letter 
she had no bounds to put upon his possi- 
bilities of crime. 

Grief-stricken as he had appeared that 
fatal morning, she remembered that after- 
ward he had referred to the dead school- 
master with less and less concealed con- 
tempt; she could see now with a certain 
exultation. He had been free from sus- 


182 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


picion because he and she had come away 
from the schoolhouse together, and had 
together cared for the sick woman all 
night. The knife with which the principal 
had been stabbed had been a paper cutter 
forged of a single piece of steel, given to 
some members of the National education 
association at Boston by a Pittsburg firm 
and that always lay on his desk. Shocking 
as was the thought, it was not impossible 
that just before he came down to walk 
home with her he had seized that knife 
and plunged it into the principal's back; 
all that long night when they were coun- 
selling together over what should be done 
to save the sick woman, he might have 
been thinking of that body bent over the 
table with the paper-knife reaching through 
into the heart. 

It was a horrible suspicion : it drove 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


183 


her almost frantic; yet the more she re- 
flected the more circumstances grouped 
to confirm it. 

Fortunately she was relieved of the 
degradation of detective work. There 
were four more bills ; if, as seemed probable, 
he had kept them back till it began to 
seem safe to use them, and then as usual 
had resolved to make her his catspaw to 
run all the risk there was, he would if 
she brought home the change from this 
be likely through her to break the others 
one by one; each additional one would be 
confirmation: the five would be certainty. 

He had long ago worried and teased 
her into turning over to him her small 
savings in the bank where the school was, 
but she had two hundred dollars in a 
trust company at her own home of which 
he was unaware. On Saturday she drew 


184 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


a hundred dollars of this, exchanging the 
fateful twenty for as much in other bills 
and keeping it hidden with a view to the 
future. And it all turned out as she ex- 
pected. When she gave him back his 
nineteen dollars he seemed elated, and in 
the course of three months he made ex- 
cuses to send her on errands to four dif- 
ferent places, each time with a twenty- 
dollar bill to change ; each time the twenty 
was one of the marked five. 

VIII 

When the five bills were all in her 
possession she lifted a brick she had al- 
ready loosened in the chimney hearth, 
buried them deep beneath it, replaced the 
brick with mortar so skilfully one would 
never guess it had been disturbed, and 
then reflected. What ought she to do? 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


185 


He was a murderer, but must she denounce 
him? He was her husband: that was no 
longer a matter of consequence. Her 
life had proved such a pitiful failure that 
she was embarking all her hopes upon that 
other frail little creature. For the babe had 
not thrived. It had had insufficient care 
before and after birth, it had been meager- 
ly fed, had lacked so much that even the 
children of poverty find about them in 
these days. But the feebler the child 
the more of her went out to it, till all her 
thoughts were of its future. 

No, it could not be her duty to pile upon 
the heaped-up misfortunes of this pitiful 
little being the disgrace of being the 
daughter of an executed criminal. As 
it failed to grow in strength her husband 
had grown more and more intolerant of it. 
“He is more interested than he knows in 


186 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


the health of that child,” her mother 
said to herself, grimly. 

IX 

When scarlet fever came, the mother 
was glad that the health laws prevented 
the necessity of her discussing with her 
husband whether she should stay out of 
school to nurse it. The husband fumed 
helplessly as he confronted a loss of ninety 
dollars in wages, besides the doctor’s bills 
and a young nurse. At the crisis though 
he was nominally excluded from the house 
he was shambling about when he heard the 
doctor say: “It is a very close call for 
her life. I hope she will pull through; 
to-night will tell. But I fear either deaf- 
ness or blindness or both.” The husband 
hurried out of doors so that his stamping 
to vent his fury might not be heard. “A 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


187 


girl brat, and blind and deaf,” he ex- 
claimed, swinging his arms furiously: 
“it would drive a prince to poverty.” 
Then he reflected, and stole into the house. 
The mother was gone for the prescription 
and the child was sleeping in the girl- 
nurse’s arms. “Let me take her a while: 
you must be tired of holding her,” the 
father said. 

The girl looked up astonished and dis- 
trustful. “I don’t think Mrs. Chesney 
would like that, sir,” she said. 

“Is that your brat or mine?” asked the 
father roughly, seizing the child by main 
force. “What it wants is fresh air; it is 
too blamed close in this heated room.” 

Without additional covering he took 
the child to a window he had opened in 
another room, where the cold north wind 
was blowing in. “There,” he said, “that 


188 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


will do her good:” and he tossed the child 
back into its nurse’s arms. 

When the mother came back she saw 
the change instantly, and the nurse ex- 
plained it. The mother lost no time in 
accusation, but sent the girl post-haste 
for the doctor again, and bent over the 
child with every muscle and nerve and 
feeling tense, 

“As we had lent her half our life to 
eke her living out.” 

She watched till the last flicker of breath 
departed and the film dropped down over 
the hapless little eyelids. Then without 
a tear she laid the child out for burial, 
made arrangements for the funeral, and 
walked with her husband to the grave 
and back: for he had said it was silly to 
hire carriages for half a dozen blocks, and 


A LIFE FOE A LIFE 


189 


those who didn’t care enough to walk 
could stay at home. 

X 

On the way back he had reckoned up 
bitterly how much the child had cost, 
so much for doctors, so much for medicines, 
so much for nurse, so much for clothes 
and food, so much for mother’s time lost 
out of school, so much for the grave, and 
digging it: and still she made no reply. 
But when they reached the house and were 
alone and he exulted, “Well, anyhow it’s 
over with, and a good riddance,” she 
looked him straight in the eye. “I am 
going to have you electrocuted for this,” 
she said. 

He laughed, but rather uneasily. Of 
course they couldn’t electrocute a father 
for giving his child fresh air. To prove 


190 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


murder you must show motive and pur- 
pose. It might be an error of judgment 
to take the child to an open window, 
but nobody could prove he meant it should 
be fatal. His wife might make a dis- 
agreeable fuss about it, but it couldn’t 
amount to anything. Still, he didn’t 
like her looks. These little women some- 
times get terribly sot. 

XI 

His wife did not take off her things, 
but went by the next train to the county 
seat, sought out the district attorney, 
told her story, and handed him the five 
twenty-dollar bills. 

“The trouble is,’’ he remarked as he 
fingered the bills curiously, “the evidence 
is after all circumstantial and depends 
mainly on you. Now a wife cannot give 
evidence against her husband.’’ 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


191 


“I don’t need to,” she replied. “My 
husband is a coward. Arrest him sud- 
denly, to-day if possible, make considerable 
display of authority, take him up to the 
room and make him sit in the chair where 
the principal was murdered, detail the 
circumstances of the deed, which cannot 
vary essentially from what I have told 
you, and then tell him that he took out 
of that waistcoat pocket that little leather 
case of bills, and that when he learned 
the numbers were kept he dared not pass 
them. Say that on April 12 he gave 
one of the bills marked C23698423 to me 
to spend at my home, a hundred and 
fifty miles away, and that I gave him back 
the change: but that the bill came back; 
and then show it to him and compare 
its number with that in the library pur- 
chase book. Tell him that on May 13 


192 


A LIFE FOE A LIFE 


he gave me another of those bills marked 
A2376849 to use in buying supplies for 
him at Ipswich, and that I brought back 
the change, but that the bill came back; 
show that to him and compare it with 
the book. Go on so with the other three 
bills and before you are done he will be 
on his knees begging for mercy. It will 
seem to him like fate.” 

“And by Jove it will be like fate,” re- 
marked the jury-experienced lawyer ad- 
miringly: for he did not know a man in 
his profession whom he could have trusted 
to outline an attack like that. 

The attack was successful. The dis- 
trict attorney and the sheriff went back 
on the same train with her, and by her 
direction found the janitor at the school- 
house. When they showed their warrant 
and read some of its sonorous phrases, 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


193 


it sounded to him like thunder out of a 
clear sky, for vengeance had been so long 
in abeyance that he had almost forgotten 
he was subject to it. He trembled as he 
sat in the chair, and shivered when the 
knife was displayed. But when one after 
another the bills were shown with the 
solemn iteration, “ but the bill came back ,” 
he was full of superstitious fear, and before 
the fifth bill was shown he was grovelling 
at their feet, begging that the punishment 
should be only imprisonment. He made 
a detailed confession which he signed and 
■swore to, and as they carried him to the 
train in handcuffs he begged to see his 
wife. This they refused. The district 
attorney, who was a well-read man, said 
that he remembered a certain Count 
Guido called in his extremity for Pompilia, 
but that she did not come. 


194 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


There was considerable corroborative 
evidence, for the case had been well looked 
up at the time, and the moment the pos- 
sibility was admissible that the janitor 
could be the murderer the rest was easy. 
At the trial the criminal made a pitiable 
exhibition of himself and the jury hesitated 
over their verdict only as long as decency 
required. The older lawyers remarked 
that the judge had never pronounced 
death sentence with less regret, and it 
was promptly executed. 

XII 

His wife never saw him after the walk 
home from the funeral. Even when she 
knew the sentence had been executed she 
felt sure she had done her plain duty. 
“There is no limit to the deeds that man 
might have done if he had continued to go 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


195 


unpunished,” she said to herself: and she 
was undoubtedly right. 

He left considerable money in the bank, 
and his widow was his executor and sole 
heir. She sold everything he had ever 
owned or bought for her, and gave the 
entire estate to the Women’s and Children’s 
hospital at Ipswich, but anonymously, and 
secretly divided into three unequal por- 
tions so that its identity could not be 
traced. 

Miss Brigham, for she had asked and 
been granted the privilege of resuming 
her maiden name, went back to school, 
at first seemingly broken down; but the 
relief from the oppression under which 
she had lived as his wife soon began to 
buoy her up, and the new love her child 
had kindled became distributed over her pu- 
pils. It soon became known not only in her 


196 


A LIFE FOR A LIFE 


room but all over the building that Miss 
Brigham was the one to go to if you were 
in trouble: she would always listen and 
understand. 

One day a father of one of her mother- 
less girls came to her and said, “Miss 
Brigham, my Lois says nobody can com- 
fort her like you. Now I want you to 
come to our home to comfort her as her 
mother, to comfort me as my wife.” 

She looked keenly at his strong, intel- 
lectual, generous countenance, and she 
said, “I believe that you would make 
any woman proud and happy and I thank 
you for honoring me. But I shall live 
the rest of my life alone.” 

He saw it was final. But she is a great 
blessing to that school. 


A Rescue 




































I 




























A RESCUE 


I 

“Yes, Mrs. Eddy, it is a satisfaction. 
To have him elected vice-principal of my 
own school, at a salary greater than I 
ever got till I was forty years old and he 
right out of college, is the culmination 
of all my hopes. 

“Yes, it has been a long pull. When 
his mother died he was eight years old. 
Up to that time he had had remarkable 
training, for there never lived a woman 
more thoroughly a lady to her finger 
tips than my wife. How she ever ac- 
cepted me with my clumsiness is still a 
wonder to me, but we did have a happy 
home. 


( 199 ) 


200 


A RESCUE 


“When she left us I felt that John must 
continue to have as nearly as possible 
the nurture she had given him, and of 
course it was out of the question for me 
to undertake it. I had always thought 
there was much to be said for the English 
custom of sending boys away to the big 
schools even when there was a suitable 
home, and in John’s case it seemed the 
one thing to do. So I visited the Groton 
school and the Hill school and St. Paul’s 
and St. Mark’s and Hotchkiss and Hack- 
ney and the rest of them, and finally 
selected Lawrence ville. 

“It is a good school, and it did for him 
what I wanted. It accustomed him from 
the beginning to associate with boys from 
the best families and with high purposes. 
So he has grown up to assume that he 
belongs with the best people there are. 


A RESCUE 


201 


When I meet anybody I think, ‘I wonder 
if he likes me?’ John’s attitude is, ‘I 
wonder if I like him?’ And it makes 
such a difference. 

“Yes, indeed, he is a fine-looking fellow. 
How tall and straight and commanding 
he is. Yes, the athletic training was 
something, but after all I think it is the 
way he has grown up to associate with 
people. He is an aristocrat in the best 
sense: a leader because he is one of the 
best and is recognized as worthy to lead. 
Yes, that is what I have aimed at all 
through : I think his mother has been 
satisfied as she has seen him grow up. 
Do I believe she has seen him? Why, 
of course. Are they not ministering 
angels? My wife has been with me just 
as really since she died as while she lived, 


202 


A RESCUE 


and I never had a joy or a sorrow that 
I did not feel she shared. 

“It will be almost like getting acquainted 
with John again to have him here. You 
see he has always had invitations for the 
vacations, and I have been glad to have 
him accept them. It is part of his educa- 
tion to be accustomed to the mode of 
living in these wealthy homes. Once or 
twice the invitation has been extended to 
me, but of course I never went. I should 
be puzzled to know which glass and which 
fork to use, and it would make me ner- 
vous to have a big butler standing be- 
hind my chair. But John is used to it: 
nothing can phase him. 

“No, I haven’t visited him in school 
much. You see the parents of these 
other boys come there in their automobiles, 
with their silks and satins and furs, and 


A RESCUE 


203 


it looks odd to see an old codger like me 
appear as a parent. Once when John 
was pretty sick I was sent for, and though 
everybody treated me with the utmost 
consideration and courtesy I could see 
that they wondered at me. 

“Perhaps they wondered where I got 
the money to pay his bills. Well, it 
hasn’t always been easy. I had quite 
a bit saved when he went away to school, 
and I have lately been able to spare a 
thousand a year out of my salary. Of 
course that didn’t pay the bills at Prince- 
ton, and in junior year I once lost courage. 
But I happened to think of my life-in- 
surance policies. I had carried them in 
the four big companies for five thousand 
dollars apiece ever since I married, and 
I found I could get a loan of nearly six 
thousand dollars on them. That carried 


204 


A RESCUE 


him through in fine shape, and I never 
had to let him know how hard 4t some- 
times came. 

“You see, when I was in college I paid 
my own way. I boarded myself part 
of the time, now and then on rather 
sparse material; and I was out teaching 
two terms, and couldn’t go to class dinners 
and join clubs because I had to watch 
every penny. That way of course I lost 
a good deal of the special charm of college 
life, and I was determined John should 
have it all. So I gave him rather an ex- 
aggerated idea of the amount I had in the 
bank, and always forwarded a check 
promptly if he expressed any new need. 
No, he has never been extravagant, He 
has simply wanted to live as the other 
boys lived, and as I wanted him to do. 
I tell you, it is worth while, now that it 


A RESCUE 


205 


is over, to see what a man and gentleman 
he is. He can enter a palace unabashed, 
and be good company for a bishop. 

“It is a great comfort for me to reflect 
what a future he has, for long ago I saw 
that I never should amount to anything. 
I don’t know what has been the trouble 
with me: seems as though I had had some 
chances, but when they came I was not 
ready for them. Curious, isn’t it: all 
your boyhood you dream of opportunities, 
and all your old age you wonder that when 
they came you didn’t rise to them. O 
well, I suppose I ought to be grateful 
for the little I have grasped: it was more 
than could have been expected of me, 
seeing that I had so little to start with 
and so few to help me. But I am happy 
now in expecting John to accomplish all 
I have missed, and so much more that 


206 


A RESCUE 


was way beyond my possibilities. Yes, 
indeed, Mrs. Eddy, I am grateful and 
proud, and very, very happy.” 

II 

“Father, how long have you boarded 
at this place?” 

“Ever since your mother died, my 
son.” 

“And you still exist: what a magnificent 
stock of vitality you must have had to 
start with. This one week has pretty 
nearly knocked me out. Did you see 
how the landlady stared when I asked 
for a couple more eggs this morning?” 

“To tell the truth, John, she isn’t 
used to being asked for extra portions.” 

“No landlady ought to be; she should 
urge them on her guests. Do you re- 
member how lovingly Thackeray speaks 


A RESCUE 


207 


of his hostess who didn't ask whether 
she should cut the ham but cut it?" 

“Mrs. Eddy isn’t a regular landlady, 
my son: she has kept me all these years 
more in friendship than as a business." 

“You must have paid her some thou- 
sands for board." 

“Yes, but that part has never been 
prominent. Every Saturday evening I 
have left my six dollars on the mantel- 
piece, and money has never been men- 
tioned." 

“But Mrs. Eddy hasn’t left her six 
eggs on the breakfast table; think of 
offering grown men a boiled egg apiece. 
Why I need half a dozen myself, if there 
is no meat or fish." 

“You must have retained your training 
table appetite, John." 

“O no: what beef I ate at a meal at 


208 


A RESCUE 


the training table would cost more than 
Mrs. Eddy’s butcher’s bill for a month. 
Why, the football manager paid twenty 
dollars a week for every one of us, just 
for the plainest sort of grub, but those 
steaks came from choice cuts.” 

“Of course we can’t live like that here, 
my son.” 

‘No, but we can live very differently 
from this. Honestly, father, I could 
not exist a month on Mrs. Eddy’s scanty 
meals, and you ought not to: you can’t 
imagine how much more energy you 
would have if you had decent fodder.” 

“I should hardly want to change my 
boarding-place after so many years.” 

“You won’t mind it after the ice is 
broken. I have been looking the matter 
up. I had to have extra meals any way, 
to keep from starving, so I have been 


A RESCUE 


209 


sampling. The Hollis House is the best 
place. The landlady there really enjoyed 
seeing me eat, and everything had a smack 
to it. She will take us to board and give 
us better rooms than we have here for 
twenty dollars a week, the two of us.” 

“But, my son, that is four dollars each 
a week more than we are paying, two 
hundred dollars a year apiece. I am 
afraid we can’t afford it.” 

“I can’t afford not to: I should not do 
myself or you justice as a teacher if I 
were not well fed. You have lived so 
long in this half-starved way that you 
don’t know what it would be to have a 
sense of happy fullness within.” 

“My stomach has been contented.” 

“But not satisfied: and there is a big 
difference. Now, dad, I am going to 
the Hollis House: it is pure necessity. 


210 


A RESCUE 


But I can’t leave you, not only because 
you ought to have good food yourself but 
because I want you right across the table 
from me at every meal. Now let me 
pay the difference in board. It is pri- 
marily for my comfort, and it will be a 
satisfaction after all the years I have 
lived on your bounty to be doing a little 
something for you out of my own salary.” 

“If you feel that you must go to the 
Hollis House, John, I will go with you, 
but of course at my own charge. It is 
worth more than the four dollars a week 
to have your face always across the table- 
cloth. You can’t guess what it means 
to me, John.” 

Ill 

“I shall have to go down to the city 
over Saturday, father: I must have a 
new spring suit.” 


A RESCUE 


211 


“Our man Miller here is a pretty good 
tailor.” 

“I am afraid Miller would hardly do 
for me.” 

“He made this suit for me: what do 
you suppose it cost?” 

“I couldn’t guess, father.” 

“Thirty-six dollars: that is the most 
I ever paid for a suit. I am almost 
ashamed of my extravagance.” 

“Then you will be dismayed to know 
that I expect to pay a hundred and twenty- 
five.” 

“For a spring suit? That seems im- 
possible.” 

“I didn’t dare itemize on clothes when 
I was in college, but now that I pay for 
my own there is no reason you shouldn’t 
know what they cost The fact is, father, 


212 


A RESCUE 


a man is judged very much by what he 
wears.” 

‘He is judged by his linen and his 
shoes and his fingernails but I never 
thought the suit made so very much 
difference.” 

“It makes an enormous difference. 
While I am in New York I shall go up to 
the University club, and undoubtedly 
be invited to dinner at home by some 
one of the boys. The consciousness that 
my clothes are made by one of the best 
tailors on Fifth avenue is a great help to 
self-possession.” 

‘‘Clothes do not make the man.” 

‘‘But they make the man unconscious 
of himself. When a man knows he is 
fittingly attired he can lose all thought of 
his appearance, and throw himself at 
his best into the conversation. If he is 


A RESCUE 


213 


suspicious that his clothes are being re- 
marked upon his nervous energy is dissi- 
pated in worry. The only safety is to 
get what few clothes one has from the 
best tailors: then one’s mind is at rest.” 

“I thought men were judged in college 
for what they were themselves.” 

“They are. I had been lucky enough 
to be able to choose my companions, and 
so far as college life went I could have held 
them well enough. But when a fellow 
invites you home with him or to meet 
his sisters, he rather expects your clothes 
to be up to date, and I saw that if I was 
to stand a fair chance all around with the 
other fellows I must dress as they did.” 

“How did you go at it?” 

“I asked the boys who seemed to me 
best dressed where they had their clothes 
made. We were all chummy about those 


214 


A RESCUE 


things, and I learned not only where to 
go but how much I should have to pay. 
I decided that Thatcher on Fifth avenue, 
near the Waldorf, was my man. He was 
a bit oldfashioned, but there was a style 
about his clothes that seemed to me 
what I wanted.” 

“When was this?” 

“In the fall of sophomore year. I 
got one of the fellows to take me there 
and introduce me. Old Thatcher wasn’t 
a bit eager to take me: said he had about 
all the customers he could look after, 
and so on; but I told him frankly just 
how I was situated and what I wanted 
and why I had come to him. He laughed 
a little, but he said I showed good sense: 
that the cost of clothes was not so much 
in what you paid for them as in what 
they were and how you wore them and 


A RESCUE 


215 


took care of them. ‘If you brush your 
suit carefully when you take it off, no 
matter how tired you are,’ he said, ‘and 
keep it on forms whenever you are not 
wearing it, a suit I make you to-day will 
look well five years from to-day. You 
have your growth pretty nearly, and if 
you will take care of your clothes and 
send them to me every year to be freshened 
up, you can keep well dressed without 
startling extravagance.’ ” 

“Did all the boys take care of their 
clothes like that?” 

“I should say not; you ought to see 
them throw their clothes into a corner 
when they took them off. But then 
there were fellows who ordered three 
suits at a time of Thatcher and a dozen 
pairs of trousers. I have had altogether 
seven suits of him. They cost me, or 


216 


A RESCUE 


rather you, more than a thousand dollars, 
but every one of them is wearable to-day — 
this I have on is a junior suit: and my 
evening clothes and afternoon suit and 
golf suit look practically as fitting as if 
I had ordered them new this year.” 

“I supposed this was a new suit; you 
certainly look well in it: but then you 
would look well in anything.” 

“Father, if I had on your thirty-six 
dollar Miller suit and you were wearing a 
suit Thatcher made, you would be a much 
better looking man than I. Thatcher is 
a real artist. He studies his customers 
and experiments with them till he dis- 
covers their best points and how to bring 
them out. I told him once the story of 
the Frenchman who when complimented 
on a pair of boots declared, ‘They were 
an inspiration!’ He replied gravely that 


A RESCUE 


217 


the Frenchman did not exaggerate: that 
all really artistic work was an inspiration, 
and that he frequently felt that way when 
after discouraging trials he at last hit 
upon a suit that made a man look his 
best.*’ 

“I never observed that your bills for 
clothes were especially large.” 

“That was because I lumped them. 
You would have been scared to see an 
item of a hundred and twenty-five dollars 
for a coat and waistcoat, but that coat 
and waistcoat I am still wearing, and all 
these years I have had the consciousness 
of being thoroughly well dressed. I 
thought it all over carefully, father. It 
wasn’t vanity that took me to Thatcher, 
but a conviction that to get just what 
you were sacrificing for me to get, that 


218 


A RESCUE 


was the wise thing to do. And after 
five years I am sure I was right.” 

Ill 

“John, I hope you won’t have trouble 
with Henry Ruger.” 

“He is a nasty little beggar. I have 
been thinking for some time I should have 
to bring matters to an issue with him.” 

“Don’t do it, my son.” 

“Why not, father?” 

“His father has always indulged him 
and will not permit him to be disciplined.” 

“What has he to do with the discipline 
of his son in school ?” 

“Nothing legally: everything in fact. 
He is president of the chief bank here, 
and most of the members of the board 
are borrowers there. He has only to 
say, ‘I want this done or you must take 


A RESCUE 


219 


up your notes,’ and he commands a 
majority.” 

“Has he ever exercised that power?” 

“Twice since I have been here.” 

“Then we must let his boy’s insolence 
go unpunished or lose our places?” 

“That is the situation.” 

“Then the quicker the issue comes, 
the better.” 

“That is what the young man says, 
what I should have said at your age. 
But I am nearly fifty years old. If I 
lose this place I am not likely to find 
another. We cannot afford to get the 
ill will of Mr. Ruger.” 

“You astonish me, father. Isn’t our 
first duty to the school, and can we per- 
form that and let this little scamp strut 
around defiant of us?” 

“Theoretically you are right; practi- 


220 


A RESCUE 


cally we have to be re-elected every year, 
and we must be prudent.” 

“Surely it is better not to be re-elected 
that to remain ingominiously.” 

“Suppose you tell me what I should do 
next year if I were not re-elected in May.” 

“Why, get some other place to teach.” 

“I couldn’t do it, John. A man of my 
age who has a place may hope to keep it 
some years, but if he is out of a place it 
is hopeless for him to seek one: the cry 
is for young men.” 

“But, father, you are no ordinary 
teacher: they can’t afford to let you go 
here.” 

“Let Thomas Ruger say the word and 
not three members of the nine would vote 
for me.” 

“And I, too, must govern my actions 
by the whims of this man Ruger?” 


A RESCUE 


221 


“Or lose your place, and perhaps mine.” 

“I am glad you did not say so this morn- 
ing. It is curious you should speak of 
it to-night, for I had my tussle with young 
Ruger this afternoon.” 

“How did it happen?” 

“He came to the desk and said surlily, 
‘Hand me that Bulfinch’s Age of Fable’. 
It was the chance I had been looking for 
and I replied, ‘Pupils here say please 
when they ask for things’. He answered 
insolently, ‘I don’t see any use in that’, 
and then the fun began.” 

“What did you do?” 

“I don’t know exactly. I hadn’t any 
plans and I haven’t any definite recol- 
lections. I have a dim notion of a boy’s 
feet and arms and head hurling around 
in the air rather wildly, and I know that 
it ended with my setting him down pretty 


222 


A RESCUE 


forcibly on his heels. He looked scared 
out of his wits, and said humbly, ‘Please 
hand me Bulfinch’s Age of Fable’. I 
don’t think I shall have any more trouble 
with him.” 

“But what will his father do?” 

“I doubt if he tells his father. I think 
there was a general feeling in the room, 
in which I am inclined to believe he shared, 
that he got just what was coming to him.” 

“I hope so, I hope so, John; but if Mr. 
Ruger is offended about it we are lost.” 

“Of course if you had warned me before, 
father, I should have obeyed your wishes, 
but my personal conviction is that I did 
the wise as well as the right thing.” 

“It can’t be helped now, John, and we 
will hope for the best. But it was taking 
an awful risk.” 


A RESCUE 


223 


IV 

“Father, do you feel like having a 
serious talk with me: rather unpleasant, 
perhaps.” 

“Why, yes, my son; you can never 
speak your mind to me too freely.” 

“Well, father, you know I am an assis- 
tant teacher as well as your son, and as 
I am a discreet listener I hear a good deal 
of what the teachers say.” 

“And you have heard something dis- 
agreeable ?” 

“The teachers are not as loyal to you 
as they ought to be, father.” 

“I don’t quite like that word loyal, 
John. I don’t know why the teachers 
should be loyal to me. We teachers 
ought all to be loyal to the school and to 
our duties, but we are all employes to- 


224 


A KESCUE 


gether, and I have no right to expect 
special consideration.” 

“O father, I think you are wrong there. 
You are the captain of the ship. Your 
orders must be obeyed, unquestioningly 
and willingly, or we shall never reach 
port.” 

“As a rule they follow directions pretty 
well, John. What especial instance had 
you in mind?” 

“You remember that at the last teachers 
meeting you spoke of concentrating upon 
the special work of the immediate lesson. 
For instance, you said, neatness is im- 
portant and yet if it is made the end in- 
stead of a means the immediate purpose 
of the recitation is lost. Miss Reynolds 
makes a mistake there in her arithmetic 
work, you said. She has formed the habit 
of having every pupil enclose the solu- 


A RESCUE 


225 


tion of his problem in a rectangle geomet- 
rically perfect. The work looks neat, 
but the attention and the time of the 
pupils go mostly to those ruler-drawn 
rectangles, not to the arithmetic.” 

“I remember saying that. I should 
not have used Miss Reynolds’s name in 
public had I not spoken to her of it several 
times in private without effect.” 

“There is just as little effect now. She 
sniffed, coming out, and said she should 
teach arithmetic in her own way in the 
future as she always had in the past.” 

“And I am afraid she will, John.” 

“But why do you permit it, father?” 

“How can I help it, John?” 

“If she won’t follow instructions get 
her out of the school.” 

“How easy that sounds. But she was 
in school before I was, and she will be 


226 


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here long after me. Two members of 
the board are relatives, she is one of the 
leading women in the Presbyterian church, 
and she knows every man and woman 
and boy and girl in town to bow to them, 
and does bow to them. How am I to 
get her out of the school?” 

“Make an issue of it. You thought it 
was impossible to discipline young Ruger, 
and yet his father went out of his way to 
thank me for it, and the boy not only 
acts respectful but really is, so far as I 
can see. I don’t believe anything is 
lost in this world by standing up for your 
rights.” 

“You had great luck in the Ruger case, 
John. I happen to know that the very 
day you thrashed the boy his father had 
discovered that his son had been deceiving 
him in an important matter, and he was glad 


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227 


enough to have the lad punished by any- 
body for any offence. If it had happened 
the week before we might both of us have 
lost our places. Nothing can be less 
secure than a schoolmaster’s tenure of 
office, especially when one arbitrary man 
has control of the board.” 

“Have you always felt this way about 
your authority, father?” 

“No; I was going to speak of that. 
When I began teaching I had a high ideal: 
I tried to live up to it myself, and to see 
that my teachers lived up to it. But I 
lost two places, John; the last about the 
time you were born, and I realized what 
it would mean to be out of work. There 
were nights when I walked way off into 
the country, wondering what would hap- 
pen if my search for another place con- 
tinued to be unavailing; and when I was 


228 


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elected here I resolved above all things 
to hold my place, that I might be sure 
to be able to take care of you.” 

“It must have come hard to you to put 
up with insubordination.” 

“It did, John. I have felt all the in- 
dignation you express, but I have got 
hardened to it, as your foot hardens to a 
new shoe. I don’t want you to think I 
have lost my ideals: I still try to do the 
best I can with the material at my dis- 
posal under the circumstances in which 
I am placed. But I do feel that I must 
avoid enmity that might cost me my 
place, and be sagacious enough to have 
at least five votes when election comes. 
You think that is mercenary. My son, 
I hope you may never walk the streets 
as I have done, wondering how you are 


A RESCUE 


229 


to earn the money to pay your baby’s 
nurse.” 

V 

“Father, how could you let Mr. Costi- 
gan talk to you that way to-day?” 

“Why, my son, Mr. Costigan is presi- 
dent of the board of education.” 

“I wouldn’t care if he were president of 
the United States: he had no right to talk 
down to you like that.” 

“Mr. Costigan is not a polished man, 
John. He is forcible, sometimes violent, 
and he expresses himself more emphati- 
cally than he realizes.” 

“But what is his relation to you, that 
he should address you as an underling in 
his employ.” 

“In a way I suppose I am an underling 


in his employ.” 


230 


A KESCUE 


“Not by a mighty sight: you are employ- 
ed not by him but by the board of educa- 
tion, and not by the board of education 
for themselves but as representatives of 
the people. Individually Mr. Costigan has 
no more authority over you than your 
shoemaker has.” 

“Technically that is true; practically 
what Mr. Costigan recommends to the 
board is carried through, so when he 
commands me he only anticipates authority 
legally exercised.” 

“But he browbeat you; I had to dig 
my nails deep into my hand to keep from 
hitting him.” 

“I am glad you restrained yourself. 
If you had hit him my career as teacher 
w T ould have ended on the spot.” 

“Has he always tyrannized over you 
like this?” 


A RESCUE 


231 


“I think his authority grows by what 
it feeds on. He is one of the little men 
to whom public authority means so much. 
It is a weakness of his that I smile at.” 

“Well, father, if he is going to behave 
like that again, don’t let me be present, 
or I shall give him another kind of weak- 
ness for you to smile at.” 

VI 

“Glad to see you back, John. Good 
time in New York over Sunday?” 

“Fine, father; I enjoyed every minute 
of it.” 

“Well, John, you know the meeting of 
the board was Saturday night?” 

“Yes.” 

“We were both re-elected, you at an 
advance of fifty dollars. What do you 
think of that?” 


232 


A RESCUE 


“I am glad to have my work approved, 
father.” 

“John, you can’t know what this year 
has been to me. I have seen so little of 
you while you were at school and college 
that it has been like getting acquainted 
with you. And to find you so fully what 
I have hoped and prayed for all these 
years — well, John, tears come even into 
a man’s eyes once in a while.” 

“It has been a delight to me too, father. 
I have learned to my astonishment and 
sometimes to my chagrin how great were 
the sacrifices you have made for me, but 
gratitude is not the chief element of my 
feeling toward you. I have enjoyed your 
companionship, every minute of it. It 
is delightful to grow older as you are 
growing older, ripening and sweetening 
as the years go by. Seems to me the 


A BESCUE 


233 


great criterion in this world is disposition. 
‘Mark me as one who loved his fellow 
man.’ When that is every year more 
and more true life is bearing its richest 
fruit.” 

“You see the best side, of me, John, 
for all that is good in me comes to the 
top with you. Since your mother died 
my life has been rather dreary, for we 
were so much to each other that her 
place has been vacant. But you have 
filled so much of it, my boy: I can’t tell 
you what it has meant to me to find you 
so entirely what she would have wished 
you to be.” 

‘‘You have given me every opportunity, 
father, not only generously but wisely. 
As I look back upon my education I 
could not have asked for any different 
environment had you been a millionaire. 


234 


A EESCUB 


You did too much for me, more than I 
should have permitted had I known the 
sacrifices you were making; but I tried 
to make the most of my opportunities, 
and I feel that every dollar brought some- 
thing.” 

“I am sure of it, my son. You have a 
future : you will rise far higher as a teacher 
than I have.” 

VII 

“I was going to speak of that, father. 
I came across this photograph the other 
day: is it a good one?” 

“Yes, it was taken at the time I mar- 
ried, and your mother was pretty nearly 
satisfied with it, which is saying a good 
deal: she looked at me with such partial 
eyes.” 

“Then you must have been at twenty- 
three very much wjiat I am now.” 


A RESCUE 


235 


“Not so big and handsome and power- 
ful as you, but like you: sometimes I am 
startled to find in you a movement or an 
utterance that reminds me so of what 
I used to be.” 

“You were as proud as I am?” 

“Alas, yes.” 

“And as sensitive?” 

“Yes, indeed, and not under equal 
self-control.” 

“But the years have subdued you. 
You submit now to injustice, even to in- 
sult. Must that be the effect of expe- 
rience on me?” 

“My boy, it is a hard lesson, but I fear 
you will have to learn it. When you 
marry, as of course you must to have 
your life at all complete, you will learn 
what it means to give hostages to fortune. 
You are proud; if work were offered you 


236 


A RESCUE 


that seemed ignominious you would re- 
fuse it, declaring you would starve first. 
Suppose you had a family, would you 
refuse it, declaring you would see your 
child starve first?” 

“In justice to my child could I take 
work that was ignominious?” 

“My boy, you have no conception what 
it means to have your next meal in doubt ; 
much less what it means to have your 
child’s next meal in doubt. You cannot 
conceive, for instance, having the desire 
to steal. But suppose your baby were 
absolutely starving and there was milk 
on your neighbor’s doorstep that you 
could get only by stealing it, would you 
not take it?” 

“That is a difficult problem, father. 
But surely such a condition is not likely 
to arise.” 


A RESCUE 


237 


“Let me tell you something. You 
were born in May, in Leominster. That 
same week the president of the board 
there insisted that a girl in the senior 
class who could not pass her examinations 
and whose character was under suspicion 
should be graduated. I refused to con- 
sent, and maintained my refusal because 
my conscience would not permit me to 
sign her diploma. She was graduated; 
I was dropped. I had been dropped 
once before under similar circumstances. 
I could get no recommendation from either 
place. It was November before I got 
this school, and I had borrowed the last 
dollar I knew how to raise. Then I saw 
that the father must compromise, and 
since then I have compromised .’ * 

“More and more every year, I suppose.” 

“A man who compromises at all will 


233 


A RESCUE 


have to compromise more and more every 
year.” 

“Must all teachers compromise?” 

“It is usually inevitable. While there 
are nine members on the board and any 
one of them may have a personal grievance 
unless his wishes are followed, no teacher 
is secure unless he learns to compromise.” 

VIII 

“Well, father, I am not going to be a 
teacher.” 

“Why, John! When you are so well 
started?” 

“I am glad to have had the year’s 
experience and to have lived through it, 
but it is no work for men. I can see how 
you have had to compromise, but I don’t 
mean to. You wouldn’t have become a 
teacher if you had foreseen how it would 


A RESCUE 


239 


wear away your pride and your independ- 
ence, would you, father?” 

“No, I confess I shouldn’t.” 

“I am going to profit by your experience. 
I mean to be at fifty just as proud, just 
as independent, just as uncompromising 
with injustice as I am now; so I am not 
going to teach school.” 

“But what will you do, John?” 

“I went to New York by appointment. 
Will Blake was my best friend in college, 
as you know. He was on the whole the 
finest fellow in the class. He went into 
business ; became an assistant to the 
American advertising manager of Lord 
Southcote’s syndicate of English news- 
papers. Lord Southcote discovered that 
his manager, to whom he was paying 
five thousand dollars a year, was taking 
advertising for other English newspapers 


240 


A RESCUE 


on the side, to the neglect of his own, 
and he came over here. He had been 
favorably impressed by Will’s work, and 
after he saw him and talked matters over 
with him, he made him manager. That 
left the assistant’s place open and Will 
recommended me. I went down to mt, j 
Lord Southcote. We three took dinner 
at the University club last night and sat 
there till one o’clock. I am hired for five 
years at a rising salary averaging twenty- 
five hundred dollars, and five per cent on 
all new business I turn in, estimated at as 
much more.” 

“It hardly seems possible, John.” 

“I was incredulous myself. I reminded 
Lord Southcote that I was without ex- 
perience in business, but he said it wasn’t 
experience he wanted, it was the right 
kind of man. As you are my father, I 


A RESCUE 


241 


suppose I need not hesitate to repeat 
that he said he liked my appearance and 
manners, and that he felt from what Will 
had told him and from his talk with me 
that he could trust me absolutely.” 

“He was not mistaken there, John.” 

“No, father, I think I have always played 
fair, and I always mean to.” 

“Well, John, of course I am glad and 
proud for you, but I confess it is going 
to be a wrench to lose you again. I shall 
miss you more than if we had not enjoyed 
this delightful year together.” 

“There isn’t going to be any missing, 
father. Do you think I want to give up 
the most congenial companion I have 
ever had? My story isn’t finished yet. 

“Lord Southcote has a suite of offices 
in the Barmouth building. Will and I 
each have our rooms with our stenogra- 


242 


A RESCUE 


phers, but the main room is in charge of 
a secretary, who receives callers, enters 
and looks after our contracts, sees that 
the advertisements are forwarded, checks 
them up when the newspapers come over, 
sends them to our customers, collects the 
bills, and keeps the accounts with the 
different newspapers over there. It is not 
difficult work, for he has our stenographers, 
but it requires absolute reponsibility. The 
man there now was mixed up with the 
ex-manager in his side commissions, so 
his place is vacant, and Lord Southcote 
and Will both asked if I knew a suitable 
person. It did not take me long to 
recommend you, and both of them agreed 
at once you were just the man. So you 
will begin July first, at the same salary 
you get here.” 

“And no more elections?” 


A RESCUE 


243 


“No more elections. You are firm in 
your place there as long as you want to 
work at all; much firmer than I am, with 
so much of experiment in my new career.” 

“So after having you for an assistant 
this year I become your assistant next 
year, John?” 

“Not a bit of it father; we are all three 
on Lord Southcote’s staff, and you report 
to him more directly than we do: in fact 
Will and I will take very good care to 
keep in your good graces, so as to hold 
our positions.” 

“You will probably tremble under my 
exactions, John. Is all this really true, 
my boy, or shall I wake up and find I 
have been dreaming?” 

“There is a good pinch, father, to prove 
to you that your troubles are over. Mr. 
Costigan may bluster all he likes, and Mr. 


244 


A RESCUE 


Ruger may insist upon his demands, 
and Miss Reynolds may be as rebellious 
as ever, but it won’t affect you. All the 
rest of your life you will have a man’s 
work to do and you can do it in a man’s 
way.” 

“And it comes through you. To think 
that you should be able to do at a stroke 
for me so much more than I have done 
all these years for you.” 

“You have done everything for me, 
father, and you can’t believe how glad 
a thing it is for me to be able to do a little 
favor for you.” 

“It isn’t a favor, John: it is a rescue.” 


The Telltale Photograph 































. 



































































































































































THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 


I 

John Allen was in many respects the 
best principal Lunenburg had ever had. 
He was there by accident. He had come 
to the village to sell an expensive encyclo- 
pedia, and instead of bringing the usual 
letters of introduction to the leading men, 
and telling them it was their approval he 
wanted, not their subscription, and all the 
well-worn devices of the book-agent, he 
had spent two months there, getting ac- 
quainted, choosing his time, and making 
men feel the need of the book without 
forcing it unpleasantly. “I wonder if 
there is anything else you have thought of 
( 247 ) 


248 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

that you would like to look up,” he would 
say ; and men got in the way of remember- 
ing what had occurred to them at the time 
they would like information about. He 
always brought the volume and showed 
them the article, so that people bought it 
because they thought it was worth while, 
and used it after they had it. It had been 
a month before he took his first order, but 
that customer was so well pleased that he 
became himself a sub-agent as he told his 
neighbors about the comfort it was to have 
a thesaurus of information, and Mr. Allen 
was making a fair income. 

He had impressed himself on those he 
had met as a man of solid information and 
good judgment, so when the principal of 
the school had been killed in the railway 
accident just after school had opened, the 
president of the board of education asked 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 249 


him, “Mr. Allen, couldn’t you take that 
place?” “I should be glad to try,” Mr. 
Allen had replied. A temporary certificate 
had been secured through the school com- 
missioner, and he had begun the next day. 

He was not a man to talk about himself. 
When asked if he were a college graduate 
he had replied that he had been obliged to 
depend largely upon self-study, and as to 
experience he said that he had taught, but 
so long ago it hardly counted. However, 
he was never found wanting, either as head 
of the school or in the class-room. He 
made his recitations especially interesting, 
not talking a great deal but getting the 
pupils to talk, and to think before they 
talked, and then supplementing their views 
by his own, which were recognized as clean- 
cut and vigorous and up to the minute. 
The only criticism upon him was that he 


250 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

was so close a student as to be unsocial. 
He did not even go to church, and quietly 
but firmly refused all social invitations. 
“I have so much to do to get ready for my 
classes,” he would say; adding perhaps 
that with Lunenburg boys the teacher had 
to get up early in the morning to hold his 
own with their inquiring minds. He was 
at the schoolhouse by eight o’clock, and 
seldom went away before six. The only 
exercise he took was long evening walks, 
always alone. It rested his eyes, he said. 

II 

Naturally he had suggested few changes 
in the school, and seemed to seek only to 
maintain the good condition that he gen- 
erously recognized. But he had observed 
that the fourth grade room was not in as 
good condition as the others, and every 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 251 


week he grew more and more disturbed 
about it. He made little suggestions that 
showed no result, and finally on the after- 
noon when school closed for Easter vaca- 
tion he asked Miss Gibson to remain and 
talk things over. 

She was not especially pleased to stay* 
and she shrank from what she felt would be 
a scolding. But she tried to conceal her 
resentment, and came up to Mr. Allen’s 
desk. “I am ready,” she said. 

“Miss Gibson,” he began, “I am troubled 
about your room.” 

“What is the matter with it ?” she asked, 
not much as if she really cared to know. 

“It is a dispiriting room. The children 
who were promoted to you in September, 
and who entered full of joy and enthusiasm, 
have lost their rebound. They endure 
what in the third grade they enjoyed. They 


252 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

don’t even play as if their souls were their 
own.” 

“Perhaps I tyrannize over them.” 

“No, it is not that; you are fair and just 
and try to do your duty. But some way 
you have the effect of the soft pedal: you 
deaden everything.” 

“If you tell me so much as that, you 
ought to go on and tell me how to help it.” 

“I wish I could; I have studied it a great 
deal. You have more beauty, better man- 
ners, a broader education, a nicer taste in 
dress than any other grade teacher here. 
Children appreciate all those things. Think 
what you could do for these youngsters of 
yours if you only enjoyed your work.” 

“Mr. Allen, do you think any teacher in 
the world ever enjoyed her work?” 

“I can hardly conceive of any one’s doing 
it unless she enjoyed it.” 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 255 


“Give me some other way to support 
myself and I would never see the inside of 
a schoolhouse again.” 

“Then you ought not to teach another 
day.” 

“I’ve got to live, haven’t I?” 

“I might reply, like Rothschild, that I 
don’t see the necessity of it, but I won’t be 
rude: in fact it wouldn’t be true. You are 
right, you have got to live. But you 
haven’t got to live by assuming to do what 
you don’t enjoy and what you cannot do 
even fairly without enjoying.” 

“What else can I do?” 

“Lots of things. You might better in- 
vent something new than keep on deaden- 
ing these children.” 

“The world owes me a living, and this is 
the only way it has shown me to collect it.” 

“The world owes your forty children a 


254 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

living, and you take it away from them for 
an entire year.” 

“I did not ask to be born, especially to 
be born a woman. I did not ask to be 
thrown on my own resources and have to 
earn my living when other girls have every- 
thing done for them.” 

“Suppose you reflect not on what the 
world owes you but what you owe the 
world. Think how many girls envy you 
what you have which they have not. How 
many cripples would wonder how you could 
be ungrateful with your perfect limbs and 
grace. How many deaf and blind and un- 
balanced would give everything to be com- 
plete like you. How many homely women 
sigh for your good looks, how many ill-bred 
women for your manners, how many un- 
taught for your education, how many 
thousands and thousands for your untar- 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 255 


nished good name. Few women have as 
much as you to be grateful for, and yet you 
complain.” 

“You should have been a clergyman in- 
stead of a teacher, Mr. Allen; you preach 
beautifully. But, really, ought you to 
keep me here after school to tell me what 
Dr. Spalding will tell everybody at church 
next Sunday?” 

“Then you don’t care to try to make that 
fourth grade happier?” 

“No, the fourth grade worries me quite 
enough in school time. In vacation I shall 
think of other things. I suppose you won’t 
try to turn me out ?” 

“I am not sure I shall be asked to remain 
myself next year.” 

“O they’ll keep you. Suppose you do 
stay, are you going to ask them to drop 


256 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 


“They may not consult me about hiring 
the other teachers.” 

“Suppose they do; suppose they ask you 
whether I ought to be kept ?” 

“If they ask me I shall say that I think 
the year in your room is worse than lost 
time.” 

“Thank you for being frank. Then we 
are enemies, and it is just as well to know 
it. How a big man does like to lord it over 
a little woman. Still, you remember the 
lion and the mouse ; I am only a mouse but 
I have sharp teeth.” 

“The mouse was the lion’s ally, Miss 
Gibson. I wish you could learn to be 
mine.” 

“Yes, by doing things your way instead 
of mine, which probably would mean that 
I couldn’t do them at all. At least I have 
discipline in my room.” 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 257 


“No; discipline is controlling will: you 
take your children’s wills away.” 

“Then I am utterly hopeless?” 

“Unless you can repent.” 

“In sackcloth and ashes. Not just yet, 
Mr. Allen. And I am not so sure you can 
turn me out; I have been here some time. 
Be careful you don’t give me a chance to 
criticise you as you are criticising me. A 
mouse can bite as well as cut a net. I 
shall be watching your conduct pretty 
closely. Good day.” 

Ill 

Miss Gibson was thoroughly angry. She 
was not often stirred: she had got into the 
habit of regarding only comfort, like a cat, 
and usually nothing seemed enough worth 
while to get excited about. But Mr. Allen 
had touched her to the raw in several 


258 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 


places, and she recognized in his determin- 
ation to be rid of her a finality the more 
hopeless because of its quietness. She 
hated him, and she was glad that for a few 
days she was going to get out of the same 
town with him. 

For she went to spend her vacation in 
Iowa. She had told no one ; she was as un- 
communicative about herself as Mr. Allen ; 
but an aunt out there, her only near rela- 
tive, had invited her to come for Easter 
and had sent her money for the journey. 
Aunt Julia was a big, stalwart, energetic 
farmer’s wife, up first in the morning, in 
bed last at night, and busiest all day, but 
always good natured and kindly and cheer- 
ful. Anne felt herself thawing out in the 
warmth of her aunt’s geniality, and sur- 
prised herself first by beginning to assist 
and then by finding she enjoyed it. “Hon- 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 259 


estly, Anne,” her aunt declared, ”1 wish 
you would give up your school and come 
out here to live. It is awfully hard to get 
help of any kind, and impossible to get in- 
telligent help like you. We will give you 
more than you can save after you pay your 
board in Lunenburg, and when you once 
get used to this free life you will wonder 
how you ever stayed cooped up in a school- 
room.” 

“She little knows how likely I am to 
accept that offer,” Anne reflected. “If 
Mr. Allen turns me out, there is nothing 
else I can do but be a maid on a farm.” 

IV 

The day before she was to return she 
called with her aunt on the minister’s wife, 
and finding topics of conversation sparse 
picked up a basket of photographs and 


260 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 


looked them over idly. To her astonish- 
ment she found among them a picture of 
Mr. Allen, and on the back was an auto- 
graph that read Willard Todd, manifestly 
in the handwriting of Mr. Allen. In an 
instant her mind was alert, but she was too 
well skilled in taking care of herself to be- 
tray her agitation. She asked about three 
or four other pictures first, and then took 
this up in turn. As she looked at it the 
minister’s wife asked, “Would you believe 
that that man is in state prison?’’ 

“O no,’’ Aunt Julia broke in, “he was 
released last summer.” 

“He was sentenced for ten years.” 

“Yes, but it was cut short for good be- 
havior.” 

“He didn’t come here.” 

“No, it was even kept out of the news- 
papers. He went east somewhere.” 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 261 


“Who was he?” asked Anne indifferent- 
ly, but drinking in deep draughts of joy. 

“The principal of the school here. He 
was found guilty of forgery. You wouldn’t 
think it to look at his face, would you ?” 

“I don’t know,” Anne said carelessly; 
“he looks as if he might do things on the 
sly. When did all this happen?” 

“In 1895: he was the first principal in 
the new building.” 

Anne put the picture down and changed 
the subject, but she had noted the pho- 
tographer’s name and number. She got 
clear of her Aunt Julia and procured a 
duplicate of the photograph. Then she 
visited the library and looked up a file of 
the village newspaper, and went to the 
newspaper office and gave the boy half a 
dollar to hunt up a certain number of 1895 
for her. When she got to her room she 


262 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

put the picture and the newspaper in her 
trunk and locked them up. “I don’t think 
you will get me out of the Lunenburg school, 
Mr. Allen,” she said to an imaginative fig- 
ure, sweeping a low curtesy. 

V 

The journey out had been tedious, but 
she longed to get away from her aunt’s and 
in the solitude of the train to plan uninter- 
ruptedly how to make the most of her re- 
venge. She thought first of exposing Mr. 
Allen before the board of education or the 
teachers or both, but on reflection that 
seemed too sudden: there would be the 
shock and then a numbness: she wanted 
him to suffer longer. No, decidedly she 
would reveal her knowledge of his guilty 
secret when they were alone together. She 
would play with him as a cat plays with a 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 263 


mouse. She would give little hints and 
seem unconscious of them. She would 
mention that she had been in Iowa during 
vacation, but in reply to his quick glance 
of inquiry seem unaware of any interest the 
fact could have for him. By the time that 
scare had worn off she would speak of Ton- 
tumwa. Then he would be scared again 
and look more intently: but again she 
would be demure. Sometime she would 
turn the conversation to crimes, and dwell 
on the particular heinousness of forgery, 
but when he searched her eyes for suspicion 
she would gaze back at him with the inno- 
cence of a child and talk of the weather. 
Finally some day before they re-engaged 
the teachers for next year she would sud- 
denly call him Mr. Todd, as if accidentally, 
and beg his pardon for her carelessness ; and 
when he demanded an explanation, as by 


264 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

that time he must, ask him if his pupils 
would lose any less in the year they passed 
in the room of a condemned criminal than 
in hers, for she at least had kept out of jail. 

Yes, she would devote the rest of the 
term to devising tortures for him. He 
should dread to meet her; he should be in 
constant terror : she would keep him worried 
close up to the point of resigning. 

Or of suicide. Yes, there would be that 
danger, and she would rather not carry her 
revenge so far as that : she did not want his 
blood on her hands. She must watch for 
indications of that, and let up on her at- 
tacks when he seemed goaded beyond en- 
durance. 

It must be hard to bear the brand of a 
condemned criminal. She remembered 
how of all her blessings he had dwelt last 
on her untarnished good name. Think 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 265 


how unbearable to meet people and know 
their first thought of him was that he had 
served years in prison. In fact, what could 
he do after she had exposed him ? He had 
somehow kept the newspapers quiet when 
he came out of prison, but nothing could 
hold back the yellow journals when the 
principal of the Lunenburg high school 
was discovered to be a convicted criminal 
under an alias. O she would have rich 
revenge on the man who was going to turn 
her out of school. 

The Tontumwa newspaper had a por- 
trait of him engraved from the very photo- 
graph she kept wrapped up in it. She had 
heard that the big newspapers keep all 
portraits published in their exchanges laid 
away in cases of little drawers and num- 
bered so that they can be instantly turned 
to if the person comes into the limelight 


266 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

again. After he had been turned out of 
Lunenburg the Hearst journals in New 
York and Boston and Chicago and San 
Francisco would blazon his face in every 
village of the country, and when he ap- 
peared anywhere people would be expect- 
ing him and would ask, “And what is your 
name to be this time, Mr. Todd ?” He had 
advised her to invent a way to live. He 
had better try inventing: it would require 
some ingenuity when she had finished with 
him. 

VI 

Undoubtedly he would still try to get 
another place to teach. Probably he re- 
ally did enjoy the schoolroom, as he pre- 
tended to. Yes, she had seen his face light 
up when a boy said a bright thing or did a 
creditable action. There was a sort of 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 267 


caress in his voice when he spoke to his 
pupils that they recognized and responded 
to. When Nelly Vogel had been so stupid 
in the arithmetic class, and had finally 
sobbed, “I really can’t think, Miss Gibson: 
I haven’t had any breakfast,” Mr. Allen 
had happened to be about, and when the 
girl was sent to her seat in disgrace had 
asked to have her come to his office. It 
seems it wasn’t to punish her. He chatted 
with her a little while till a boy got back 
with sandwiches and grapes and a pint of 
milk. She had heard Mr. Allen say he 
never enjoyed a dinner as much as he did 
seeing that child eat. Probably that was 
true : she could see how he might get a real 
pleasure from it ; and of course it made the 
children worship him, for he was always 
finding out what children especially needed. 

There were other hungers than those of 


268 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

the stomach. On the first day of the new 
year, for instance, Lucy Stebbins had come 
up to her at noon and held out her tiny 
hand and said, “You are going to like me, 
aren’t you, Miss Gibson?” She knew the 
poor little orphan had a hard time with her 
severe aunt and no doubt ought to have 
responded to the wistful appeal; but she 
was tired with arranging the new class and 
had not taken the little hand, only saying 
crossly, “Of course I shall like you if you 
behave yourself.” Mr. Allen wouldn’t 
have done that: he would probably have 
taken the child up in his arms and kissed 
her and always been careful to distinguish 
her by a special greeting. Then there was 
Mickey O’Hara, the red-headed, freckle- 
faced, snub-nosed little scamp who used to 
say such droll things that he kept the school 
in an uproar. She had quenched him by 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 269 


never smiling and often reproving him, 
till now his replies were as conventionally 
stupid as little Becky Shotwell’s. Why 
couldn’t she have responded to his Irish 
humor and encouraged the school in a 
hearty laugh now and then? Her ideal 
had been quiet and system and discipline: 
but why ? Mr. Allen was right : she dead- 
ened her room ; she kept her foot always on 
the soft pedal. In fact that was why she 
had been so angry with him, because she 
knew in her heart he was right. She was 
ashamed of herself. The first thing she 
did after she unpacked her trunk would be 
to burn that photograph and that news- 
paper. Was it actually true that she might 
really enjoy teaching if she approached it 
differently? It hardly seemed possible: 
she had hated it so and supposed she always 
should hate it. But she could see how 


270 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

different it would be if her spirit were like 
Mr. Allen’s. May be he was right: she was 
half inclined to experiment. 

VII 

There was a chance to experiment on the 
train. Three or four seats ahead of her 
across the aisle was a woman with an infant 
and a little girl nine or ten years old, the 
age of her own children in school. Mani- 
festly they had come a long way, and the 
journey had been a hard one: in the morn- 
ing Miss Gibson had bemoaned her mis- 
fortune in happening to be located in a car 
with a squalling baby. But in the new 
light that was breaking over her she saw 
a wearied mother struggling with poverty, 
and without even food enough in her 
luncheon box to satisfy the little girl’s 
hunger. She reflected that it might be a 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 271 


nice thing to take that child out to dinner 
with her: she could try then whether like 
Mr. Allen she could enjoy seeing another 
eat better than eating herself. There was 
considerable inertia to overcome, but she 
remembered the card over Mr. Allen’s desk 
with “Do it now” on it, and by a sudden 
effort of the will she rose and went forward 
and sat opposite the woman. 

She chatted with her a little about the 
journey, showed interest in the infant, and 
put her arm around the little girl’s waist 
as she said, “I have a whole room full of 
little girls of your age.” The child res- 
ponded affectionately on the instant, glad 
to have the tedium of travel relieved by a 
fresh voice and a kindly smile. So when 
the waiter came through the car with his 
“First call for dinner, service a la carte,” 
Miss Gibson said to the mother, “I wonder 


272 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

if you won’t let your little girl go in to din- 
ner with me. It is so lonely by one’s self 
and the portions are always twice as large 
as I can eat.” 

“O mother!” cried the child eagerly. 

“I am afraid she doesn’t look well enough 
to go into the dining-car,” queried the 
mother anxiously. 

”0 yes, she does,” replied Miss Gibson, 
“I shall be proud of her.” 

It proved to be true. The child ate 
three-fourths of all that was brought, and 
as Miss Gibson saw her pass from ravenous 
hunger to satisfaction and contentment, 
she realized that it would have been better 
to go dinnerless to bed than to have missed 
it. The extra expense had not been much, 
so she could afford to take a pot of tea and 
a plate of strawberries back to the mother. 
As she handed them to her she said, ‘‘Now 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 273 


let me take your baby a while. Nelly and 
I will go up to that section in front and give 
you a bit of rest.” 

The woman protested, but Miss Gibson, 
not without apprehension, insisted upon 
taking the infant, and was gratified to find 
it ready to come to her. They went for- 
ward, Nelly accompanying, and played to- 
gether for half an hour, the baby crowing 
with delight. When they came back the 
mother said, “You don’t know what you 
have done for me ; I feel like a new woman. 
We are poor people and can’t afford to 
travel, but my father is at the point of 
death and my husband insisted that I 
should see him again before he died. We 
had to scrape to get the money to come, 
and we shall have to economize for a long 
while after, but my husband is so generous 
he would not have it any other way.” 


274 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

Then she told about her struggles on their 
little Idaho farm, and as she talked her 
confidence grew, till Anne was surprised 
not only at the freedom with which the 
mother spoke of her experiences but at the 
human interest they had even for her, a 
stranger. 

She had seen that the three had only a 
single berth, and as Nelly grew sleepy 
Miss Gibson said, “I am going to ask a 
great favor of you. It is so lonely all night 
in this big car, I wish you would let Nelly 
come and sleep in my berth.” Again the 
mother protested, but Nelly was so eager 
and came so near detailing some of the dis- 
comforts of the night before that the 
mother consented. When they were 
stretched out side by side, Nelly’s little 
hand confidently holding Miss Gibson’s 
finger as she went to sleep, the teacher’s 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 275 


eyes filled with tears. “And all these years 
I might have had it,” she sobbed to herself. 

VIII 

“May I walk home with you ?” asked Mr. 
Allen after school the first day. He had 
not been in her room and could not know 
of her new purposes. She would say 
nothing of them: he must see for himself; 
so she assented without surprising him by 
being too willing. 

“I have heen thinking about you, this 
vacation,” he said. “I was unjust to you 
that last afternoon. In the old teaching 
when a boy did not learn his lessons in arith- 
metic or grammar, we called him bad and 
punished him. The new education sees 
only that his energy is misdirected, and 
tries to arouse an interest in something 
different, like manual training, for instance, 


276 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

thereby creating an interest in the school 
that will extend to the grammar or the 
arithmetic. 

“Now if that is sound pedagogy for pupils 
it must be sound pedagogy for teachers. 
You don’t take exciting interest in reading 
and spelling and arithmetic, but you are an 
artist in flowers. I remember your gerani- 
ums. How you could make them grow as 
you did in that boarding-house of yours I 
don’t see: evidently you love them. 

“Now why not transfer some of this work 
to the school-room? I have secured an 
appropriation of ten dollars for flowers for 
your room. You shall pick them out and 
take care of them, and teach your children 
to care for them and love them as you do. 
You know nature study is just now the last 
word in education. You shall have nature 
study in your room. Besides the flowers 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 277 


there, one afternoon every week you shall 
close school at two o’clock and take your 
children out into the fields and woods, and 
discover with them all the flowers and trees 
about here. Your children may make lists 
of them and write little stories about them, 
but above all they shall learn to see them 
and love them. Nobody else in school can 
do this work as you can. Will you under- 
take it ?’ ” 

He was doing all this for her. He should 
never know she had already repented, but 
he should believe his nature study had done 
it: it was his work, anyway. So she 
assented, taking care not to do so too cor- 
dially so that the change should be more 
manifest afterward; and she helped him 
plan the new course. 

At noon the next day he came to her 
room and said to the class : “Now children, 


278 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

you will meet for school this afternoon not 
here but at Mr. Marquisee’s greenhouse. 
Do you all know where that is?” 

They wondered, but they knew, and they 
were there. Mr. Marquisee was a florist 
because he loved flowers and he entered 
into the new project with enthusiasm. 
The children were told that each could pick 
out his own flower of all the multitudes in 
the greenhouse, and Mr. Marquisee led 
them through, describing lovingly the ger- 
aniums and the heliotropes and the mignon- 
ettes, and, best of all, the carnations, of 
which he had developed some remarkable 
varieties. He told how each plant must 
be cared for and showed which it would be 
wisest to take to a school-room, till the 
children, eager to pick out just the best one, 
grew to learn a great deal about hot-house 
flowers. The people of Lunenburg stared 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 279 


to see Miss Gibson’s pupils march two by- 
two through the streets to the school-house, 
each carrying carefully a flower-pot, but 
the children were proud enough, and there- 
after school had a new meaning for them. 
The janitor could not open the doors early 
enough for them to come in to water their 
little treasures, and each was proud not 
only of his own plant but of the school- 
room, adorned with the most delightful of 
embellishments. When Nelly Vogel’s ge- 
ranium died the child was broken-hearted 
but Mr. Allen had taken her in his lap and 
smoothed her hair and said, “Your name 
shows what you ought to have here,’’ and 
he brought her a canary in a bright cage, 
that swung to and fro in the sunlight and 
filled the air with twittering. All the 
other scholars wished they were in Miss 
Gibson’s room. 


280 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

But when the next Tuesday, after the 
first two recitations, the children were 
marched out of school and went off with 
Miss Gibson to hunt for hepaticas, there 
was more envy. What a good time her 
children did have, and how much they 
learned about the sweet little harbingers 
of spring, and the dog root, and the violets, 
and presently the columbine and all the 
rest. They were not told what to see, but 
asked about what they did see, and Miss 
Gibson found it easy to give their observa- 
tion the classifying habit of science. The 
next morning each was to bring to school 
his own written story of the afternoon, and 
as she looked them over, selecting some of 
the best to read before the school, Miss 
Gibson realized that the sketches revealed 
more of the writers than of the flowers. 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 281 


IX 

She was engaged upon a pile of these 
stories one day after school till she was the 
only one in the building, when she happened 
to see a man coming up the walk whose 
tallness and swing and store clothes and 
broad-brimmed soft hat made her think of 
Iowa. She believed that man was after 
Mr. Allen, and instantly her instinct of pro- 
tection was aroused. ' So when he found 
his way to her room and asked where the 
principal was, she replied without looking 
up from her work that she could not tell. 

“See here,” urged the man in an authori- 
tative tone, “I am the sheriff of Tontumwa 
county, Iowa, and when I ask where any- 
body is I expect to be informed.” 

It was as she had feared and her mind 
was alert. 


282 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

“He may have gone down to the Edgerly 
woods,” she said; “the school is making a 
herbarium of the plants there.” 

“Where are the Edgerly woods?” 

“If you will turn to the left as you go 
out of the schoolhouse, and follow the road 
half a mile or so, you will come to a white 
house with two red barns. Turn to the 
right there and go a quarter of a mile or so 
and you will see the woods on the left.” 

The distances were twice what she had 
named, but she wanted him to be sure to 
go. When she saw him stalking down the 
road with his long strides she ran over to 
Mr. Allen’s boarding-place, and without 
ringing the bell flew up the stairs and tapped 
at his door. When he appeared wonder- 
ingly she put her fingers to her lips and said 
in a whisper, “The sheriff of Tontumwa 
county is here, looking for you.” 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 283 


“What do you know of the sheriff of 
Tontumwa county?” he asked. 

“I spent Easter vacation in Tontumwa.” 

“And you have known all this time?” 

“Everything.” 

“And you have told no one ?” 

“I did not even let any one there see that 
I recognized your photograph.” 

He took both her hands and looked into 
her eyes so searchingly that she turned 
them away. “How little I have known 
you,” he said: and he would not let her 
hands go, even when she tried to release 
them. 

“But we need not be afraid to meet the 
sheriff of Tontumwa county,” he said, 
coming back to the matter in hand. “I 
served the full sentence for the crime I was 
convicted of, and there isn’t any other. 
Where is he?” 


284 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 


Miss Gibson told him. “You certainly 
are a loyal friend,” he smiled, “but let us 
go to meet him.” 

“Us?” 

“Yes, you especially. I want you with 
me. 

They did not have to go far, for the sheriff 
had met a man who had come up the road 
and assured him Mr. Allen could not have 
gone to the woods since school. When the 
sheriff recognized Mr. Allen he took off his 
hat and stretched out his big paw. “Put 
it there, Willard Todd,” he said, “Mr. 
Emery has confessed.” 

“And Mrs. Emery?” asked Mr. Allen 
anxiously. 

“Had died the day before. That brought 
Mr. Emery around for a little. But he is 
hopeless with chloral, and he has been 
committed to an asylum. Young woman.” 


THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 285 


the sheriff said, turning to Miss Gibson, 
“this man’s name isn’t Allen; it is Willard 
Todd, and he is free to take it back and 
may be proud of it. Miss, that man let 
himself be convicted and served a ten 
years sentence for a crime he never com- 
mitted just to save the real criminal’s wife, 
who had heart disease and whom he felt 
grateful to.” 

“That doesn’t express it, Miss Gibson,” 
said the principal, “she had been a mother 
to me.” 

“Well, I’m not here as sheriff, Willard 
Todd,” continued the stranger; “I am here 
as president of the Tontumwa school board, 
and we want you back there. Tontumwa 
has grown since you went away, and we’ll 
give you twice the salary you had seven 
years ago. There are two men on the 
board that used to be your scholars, and 


286 THE TELLTALE PHOTOGRAPH 

they warned me that if I hadn’t persuasion 
enough about me to induce you to come 
back, there’d be a new sheriff in Tontumwa 
county.” 

“Will there be a place for my wife?” 
asked the principal. 

“Sho! You married to her?” asked the 
sheriff, taking off his hat and looking ad- 
miringly at Miss Gibson. 

“No, but I expect to be then.” 

And he was. 














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